Okay, so I’ve not been updating my blog lately.  I haven’t been travelling that much, but thats no excuse because I’ve still been shooting and well, this is a photography blog as well.  A thousand appologies.

Today I present Jungle Girl, or at least the do-over of Jungle Girl.

Jungle Girl

I had previouslly booked Kate in July to do an after work shoot at a friend’s home.  His subdivision has a large natural arboritum that had all the characteristics I was looking for in regards to a shoot idea I had.  I needed a brook or creek, a fern bed, some fallen trees, etc.

I had seen a photo on Model Mayhem of what appeared to be a feral woman dressed in rags that had apparently been cornered in her forest home.  I had been wanting to do an outdoor/woodsy shoot for some time, but the cliche bikini model in the waterfall shot was all that was coming to my little unimaginative brain.  But this woodland feral look or jungle girl had a lot of possiblities.  Kate liked the idea so we comparied schedules.  No weekend’s worked out, so we figured we would try it after work.

Well it took a lot longer to get to the site than we expected.  By the time we got the styling done and got to the woodland location we were shooting, we had less than an hour to shoot.  The forest canopy is incredibly thick and to get anything reasonable meant shooting at ISO 800 or above and even then I had to supplement the lighting with an off camera strobe through a softbox.

There were a few photos I felt okay about, but still the noise, the softness from the low shutter speeds and the unnatural lighting just disappointed me more and more every time I looked at them.  The solution was to admit I stank and see if Kate would humor me with a do-over.  Which she did.

This time, we scheduled the shoot for a Saturday mid-day time frame.  Her hair and makeup appointment started at 11am and we were basically shooting by 2pm.  We shot at the same location, so travel chewed into our shoot time again.  We also had to dodge a tropical storm.  Hanna was scheduled to hit Raleigh around 10am.  After watching the track, I figured by 2pm we would either be free of the storm or only have to dodge a few light rain showers.  The biggest concern for me was clouds.  Lack of light killed the last shoot and I needed lots of sun for this.

The main goal was to use a pair of refelctors to find sun peeking through the canopy and angle the light back in on the model.  No sun, no reflecting.

In addition to Jungle Girl, we added a colorul red formal dress, with plans to “Trash the dress” into the mix as well as a Rambo/GI Jane look as we had access to some military uniforms and a weapon.  A fun day was in store.

Being able to shoot in the ISO 100-400 range using natural light and reflectors produced some much more dramatic lighting and allowed for sharper, more colorful images.

What do you think?  Was the redux worth it?

Sunshine Girl, originally uploaded by Miracle Man.

This weekend, save offending a few family members was one of the best photo events I’ve participated in…

The Holden Beach Bikini Bash!

The concept was simple, with another photographer, makeup artist and hair stylist, go to the beach, bring a few bikini models along and shoot shoot shoot.

This summer, my wife’s family has rented a beach house at Holden Beach and I got the go ahead to shoot the first Sunday of the trip.

Makeup Artist Lollycat who I work a lot with recruited a great hair stylist to join me and fellow photographer Tom Winstead for the trip. We recruited several female modes and a male model. The plan was to shoot at various locations around Holden Beach.

The first call for makeup and hair was for 5am. New Model Sara, on her first shoot arrived the night before and the idea was to hit sunrise at 6:06. Well due to a late night before, and various reasons, we were a bit late getting to the beach. But that was okay. It gave Sara a chance to get some experience before the other models started to show up.

We had scheduled two shifts of models, a morning shift and an afternoon shift. One model couldn’t make it, but with four models we were still quite busy. I was surprised by the amount of downtime between actual shoots, but considering how tired we were at the end of the day, I’m glad we had them. We had planned to shoot until sunset, but we were too tired to make it.

We ended up with really good stuff and are already planning another trip.

Tom summed it up best “There are worse ways to spend a Sunday Afternoon!”.

Field of Dreams (Dream Version), originally uploaded by Miracle Man.

We’ve all seen them. A model wrapped in caution tape hiding the naughty bits, a person on rail road tracks. They are the “Cliche” shots. They are the shots that are so over done but yet your compelled to shoot them anyway.

Cliche shots include sunsets, sunrises, fireworks, macro’s of flowers or bugs on flowers but we all continue to shoot them So obviously there are still reasons to shoot them. (Reader Note: Yes, you will find these in my photos as well…..)

Well there is a cliche shot I’ve been wanting to shoot for a very long time. That is the sun-dress clad woman walking aimlessly through a field of wild flowers or over grown grass.

This shot is usually shot at a low depth of field to help blur the foreground and background having the model and the plan she walks in being in focus.

Well I finally got my chance. Having done some indoor shots with the incredible model Evan Stacy we moved outdoors. Now in the cliche version of this, she should be wearing a light color sun-dress. But we had been shooting a rocker girl look all day so we ended up with black pin-stripe pants and a black sheer top with a touch of pink trim.

After shooting several poses against an abandoned gate and with some flowering bushes, we moved to an open area in the field.

This was going to be tough. I only had about 50 feet of “ridge” to work with that gave the background a distant look. One angle produced a green on green look due to the angle of the sun. Another angle, I got a more amber grass and nice rim lighting on the model and a green tree line. Somewhere in between was a huge monstrosity of humanity, the large power main, the kind with the huge “Transformer” Robot looking towers with multiple overhead power lines.

Only having two angles, I decided to shoot both. I just had Even walk naturally from one place to another and then back. She of course was watching for snake holes, fire ants (and thats a story in itself!), and gopher holes. She was clearly a bit uncomfortable in this setting, but being a professional she managed to still provide great looks.

From the dozen or so frames shot in the two walks, I pulled two that I liked. One seen here:

was the angle where I was green on green. This seemed like a very natural opportunity to go Black and White. I generally have a philosophy that if color doesn’t add meaning to the photo, then it should be B&W. (Editors Note: Then why I don’t I do more B&W?).

A touch of sepia later and I have a photograph that I’m happy with. Still not quite what I had hoped for, but it would work for certain fashion conscious upscale clothing chains, like American Eagle or Abercrombie and Fitch. (Not that I will be marketing these any time soon).

But still, it wasn’t quite what I wanted. So I turned to another photo — terribly over exposed. I was on spot meter and Aperture Exposure at F4/ ISO 100. The meter was on the model’s black outfit. Spot meter on black, you get an over exposed photo, spot on white, get an under exposed photo. You would think 25+ years I’d get it.

I preach it. I know it like the back of my hand. All I could do was curse at myself for blowing it with the camera settings. I was too caught up with the shoot to pay attention to the shoot.

But thankfully I was shooting RAW. In the photo in question (the one above), it was about 1 stop over exposed. Adobe Photoshop’s raw converter has a “Recovery” slider to help recover blown highlights. A slight exposure adjustment and a big increase in contrast and I now had a photo that looked pretty good.

Satisfied with what I had done, the web friendly size got emailed to the model, makeup artist and hair stylist, who happened to be out to dinner together.

SIDEBAR: They get to go out and eat and drink while I have to slave over a computer? What an injustice!

The next morning, I get two vibrates and a tweedelbeep later, the makeup artist, Lollycat text messages me “Hey can you make that one dreamy?”

Sure, pop open Photoshop, my tool of choice and I start hacking away. In doing so, I could have just thrown a quick filter to blur things a bit and been done. But that wouldn’t suffice. I wanted to match my dreams. If I’m going to us Photoshop, a master once told me, “Use it”.

The steps involved are documented on the top photo if you click through and read the caption on Flickr. But I went from a horribly executed (but decently composed with a great look fro the model) in camera experience to a decent post production piece.

I have to put out my photojournalist’s disclaimer. I would not publish in a news paper or news magazine this image as real. Its a photo illustration. Its art!. End of disclaimer!

What do you think?

Okay, so I hate myself for not taking my camera. But you know, I can do some cool things with Photoshop. But first let me say…..

As a professional photojournalist, what I did above is very unethical. This is not a photo, but a photo illustration. I would never attempt to pass this off as real. Disclaimed. I can now live with myself.

The photo scene is a mash up of three photos. The foreground photo, with the fountain, the statues playing in the water, fence was shot the night after the fireworks at Broadway at the Beach in Myrtle Beach, SC

The two fireworks shots are older shots which can be found in my Flickr photostream. Here are the two photos.

The two fireworks source photos.

The photos were added as separate layers on top of the original and placed to where they looked natural. Then using the eraser tool, I erased the edges so they blended in and opened holes to let the fountain and such so through.

So, its kinda what I saw, just a day later!!!

The point of this exercise through isn’t the act of making something in photoshop or making up for my forgetting the camera.  I did this to illustrate my previous comments about fireworks being boring unless they are anchored somewhere.

Looking at the two source photos, they are themselves okay as far as fireworks photos go, but they are nothing to write home about, but looking at the mashup with a foreground subject the photo is much more attractive

Let me count the ways….

Okay, I’m thinking Hate isn’t the right word. Perhaps Loath is a better choice.

Way #1

You see, I’ve been traveling a lot for business. That means most of my shooting time is at night and night photography benefits significantly from a tripod. My big aluminum Bogen with a nice ball head is a pain to travel with when I fly. So I’ve gotten pretty good with makeshift bean-bags. But here is my driving trip to Myrtle Beach and what did I do? I left the the tripod at home….. Doh!

Way #2

Murphy’s Law is in effect. Every time I don’t take my camera on a trip, I regret not having it with the exception of my last trip to Buffalo which I didn’t miss my camera. (Sorry friends in Buffalo, if you get my drift). So I have my camera on this trip and I’m looking forward to getting some good shots. In fact tonight at dinner, I saw some really good “Night Photography” opportunities.

So as I’m walking trough “Broadway at the Beach”, the huge monolithic tourist trap complete with a Hard Rock Cafe, and a KISS themed coffee shot, I’m saying to myself . . . “Man, I should have brought the camera. But don’t worry, I’ll come back, the lights are not going away.” It was at this time I realized that I forgot the tripod!!!!

I had a fantastic dinner at the Key West Grill. A reasonably Conch Republic themed restaurant that isn’t part of a chain. As I was paying my bill and getting ready to leave, some rather odd lights caught my eye.

Across the street (and coincidently two buildings down from my hotel) is a minor league baseball field and they happened to have a home game tonight.

It was Fireworks night.

Photographically, fireworks are fun to photograph, but there are a million photos of red and green bursts, some quite nice. But like Sunsets, the fireworks themselves doesn’t make for a strong photograph. You need something to give them a frame of reference. In the case of sunsets, there should be something, a tree, person, building that is silhouetted by the setting sun making them the subject and the sunset the setting. Fireworks are the same. Bursts of colorized burning pyrotechnics against a black sky is well boring, cliche and over done. But put something in the foreground, a statue, a building, a person and your off to creating a wonderful piece of art.

Well as I started walking back to the car there it was. A well lit, attractive foreground with the fireworks providing a beautiful background. The photo would have been perfect. It would have spiraled to #1 on Flickr Explore. It would have sold multiple times to various stock houses. I would have made enough to get my Nikon D3.

Would have.

No camera. No Tripod. And the event will not repeat while I’m here.

Oh How I Hate Me!

Note: Yep, there is no photo with this post because I forgot my camera!!!!!

Doh!

Camaro, originally uploaded by Miracle Man.

Travel doesn’t always mean going on the road. Sometimes a quick jaunt to an empty parking deck can let you travel through time.

Sort of.

Our local group of photographers who share Flickr as our communications recently got together to photograph a vintage Chevy Camaro. We also had a modern Ford Mustang and a couple of cool motorcycles.

A date was set. We would use the top of a local public parking deck. Of course, several of us photographers have a habit of wanting to photograph models (of the Human) variety alot. So the question was posed . . . “Can we bring models?” The answer was yes.

What could be better than Muscle cars? Muscle cars with bikini wearing models.

We had a good showing of photographers along with two models, Becca and Laruen and a local makeup artist, Joanne Crowder.

The shoot started at 4pm but the models were not scheduled in for another hour, so we took our shots, but you could tell, everyone was really waiting on the models.

Becca was the first to arrive and within a few minutes, the Mustang never looked better. By the time we finished up with the Mustang and started moving Becca to the Harley Davidson softtail, Lauren showed up and was getting her makeup done.

Both models made it to the Harley. Then it was the Camaro’s turn. Eventually Becca had to go and we were left with Lauren to finish out the shoot with the sun setting in the background.

When I was looking at the photo above, it looked pretty good right out of the camera. Nice well balanced colors, good saturation, etc. In fact I felt it looked too good. Our modern Digital SLR cameras are tuned to give us sharp, bright, colorful photos. But sometimes its best to have a photo that doesn’t look all new and shiney.

So I decided to take this 40 year old car back to the late 60’s via a little Photoshop wizardry. First, I desaturated the colors about 25% to make it look like a faded photo.

Color prints from the late 60’s were printed on a paper that tends to redshift over time. So using the Level’s tool, while only working on the Red channel, I shifted the mid tones to give it a reddish look. Not satisfied, I visited the green and blue channels making minor tweeks until I was satisfied with the look.

So lets take a trip to 1968…….

White Tiger

Originally uploaded by Miracle Man

I enjoy zoos and I try to get to them when I can. On a lot of my trips, there usually isn’t time to stop in. But on a recent trip, I managed to have a couple of hours before my flight to make a repeat visit to the Miami Metrozo.

Zoo’s basically come in two varieties: The older style zoos have their exhibits in cages for the most part. An example of this is the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. The other is more open natural habitats where cages are exchanged for pits with electric fencing to keep the animals in.

Generally zoos that cage are constrained on space. The natural habitats take lots of space. For an inner city zoo like Lincoln Park, they do an amazing job in so limited space.

The Miami Metrozoo is a natural habitat zoo. The walk is 3 miles covering 300 developed acres out of 750. They offer a monorail and rentable 2 and 4 seat quad-cycles to help get around.

I was a little unprepared for the price. Still, the price is reasonable at less than $14 per adult. I was expecting under $10 but thats what I get for not visiting the zoo in almost 10 years.

The Metrozoo’s showcase exhibit is the tigers which is just off the front entrance. They have two typical bengal tigers and one white tiger. They are beautiful. The exhibit is decorated with what appear to be ruins from older civilizations.

As a photographer, there isn’t a lot of motivation to leave this exhibit. In particular around feeding time as the tigers can be rather active. They are quite photogenic and with a reasonable 80-200 mm lens attached to most digital SLR’s you can expect to get reasonable photos.

Then you turn around and a pond filled with colorful Caribbean flamingos await your lens.

My trip to the zoo was cut short by rain. And if your used to life in South Florida, it rains pretty much every day, but they are brief popup showers and usually a few short minutes later the sun is evaporating the rain creating a lovely hot humid day. Well this day, it was destined to rain for the rest of the afternoon.

I had gotten about as far into the park as the gorillas which is a story in itself. Anyone questioning evolution would have realized today that Darwin was on to something.

The big silver back was sitting by hisself just to the left of an edge in the rocks. About 10 feet to his right around the other side of the edge sat an older female who was sporting a rather round mid-section. Yes, she was an expectant mom. No big deal so far. However, the expressions were priceless. The silverback clearly had the “I’m in the doghouse… Please let me out” expression on his face. The female’s face was full of anger. Clearly she was unhappy with the greyback and she was sending him a silent message through her expression. He was begging for forgiveness and she wasn’t falling for his charms.

Not a word was said, but it spoke volumes.

While on the subject of evolution, just around the big rock sat the chimpanzees who were munching on some lovely coconuts. However, several were using sticks to extract the meat much as we would use a fork or spoon. Yep, thats tool use. Evolution right in front of our eyes. Next up for them, Corvettes!

I decided it was time to leave once I realized how wet I was and how much fun it was going to be on the airplane soaked.

The flipside of evolution, proof that there is a greater power at work. On my way into the park, a plastic grocery bag was blowing across the parking lot. Now of course having the bag make it to a habitat would be bad so I picked it up and with the brooding skies, I decide to pocket it instead of trashing it.

My Nikon D200 was being protected by this lucky plastic bag which just happened to float its way to me. Someone was watching out for me that day.

On the way back out, the tigers were up and moving and alert. Rain or not, it was time to spend more time with the kittens. Using my already soaked Publix bag as a raincoat for my camera I snapped a few more shots of the cats and then some very active shore birds.

Enough was enough. Car, Lunch/Dinner, then off to MIA for my trip home.

So if your in Miami, spring $14 and go see this fabulous zoo.