Working in Detroit

What am I shooting in the middle of the (hot) street with the instagramming audience behind me? Something big, concrete, ferocious, and distinctly a Detroit icon. Check it out after the jump.

Helpouts

I'm very excited to announce that Google selected me to be a participant in a just-launched program called Helpouts, where people can get real time video help from an expert. They contacted me to be one of the photography experts on the site, and asked me to set up a unique Helpout program that revolved around the type of work I do. 

And most of what I do is lighting, which is probably best taught in person, hands on with gear, or at least in tutorial style videos that can be watched at leisure. So I had to change gears a little bit and include the part of my workshops that we don't always get to do in the way I'd like.

Portfolio reviews are important to any photographer, at virtually every stage of their career. Getting feedback from friends and family is a good place to start, but many believe that this sort of help can actually be counterproductive. Of course your mom thinks your work is great. Mine has never had a bad thing to say about even my worst photos.

So I'm glad to share my experiences and give any photographer, from the new-camera-in-box to working professional like myself, a portfolio and marketing critique and review. Any photographer can benefit from a new set of eyes going through their work and offering a different perspective on how it's all presented. I'm hoping the Helpout program will be a part of my workshops in the future for people that need the time for some one-on-one advice.


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Bags and Bags and Bags

After moving home to Detroit a few months ago, I received the expected chorus of 'wait, you LEFT New York to find more work?'

Yes, I left NYC to pursue new clients in my hometown and expand my creativity in ways I felt I couldn't do in the city.

And it's worked, quite well actually. One client that's been listed, but hasn't had a post yet, was worth the entire move alone. And this stunning Gator bag that's been half drawn as though to depict it's original planning stages was a part of it as well.

Most of my work in NYC was E-comm, for The Evolution Store where this guy's siblings may have ended up, and other designers, jewelry makers, restaurants and more. One market I hadn't tapped into yet was a little bit further from home than I expected, but a working vacation is never a bad thing.

It also turns out that leaving NYC was the way to get my work back there. Granted, a line sheet isn't the most glamorous of things, nor will it have my name attached, but it's being shown during Fashion Week to potential buyers.

I worked with a much larger team than I usually do for products (usually just myself) and it was needed. Over 120 bags and accessories in three days of shooting involving an assistant/stylist, two production managers, a graphic designer, and the owner herself with high expectations.

Once we got a system going, and named a few newly minted bags ourselves, this job looked like a drop and pop on the surface, but with the variety of materials used, including python, leather, sheepskin and stingray, we had to tweak lighting every time we changed to a different kind of bag.

While I'd love to take my sweet time on each bag and perfect lighting on each one, I've at least developed a system that looks good on a variety of subjects with as minimal changes as necessary. We even adapted my top-down back to a shoot into table so we wouldn't waste the 15 minutes or so changing tables.

I've also got my magical traveling studio down pat, removing a bunch of stuff that we can easily buy once on location, and bringing just the essentials and irreplaceables. There's no real camera store for over 100 miles, so new 1DMKIV batteries are out of the question.

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Detroit Dirt

Upon my move back to Michigan, I set a goal of acquiring clients that were Detroit specific. If you haven't noticed, Detroit is going through a rough patch right now, but thats when you get in at the ground level, and build the infrastructure and creative resources a city will need. 

Pashon has a similar idea thats even more involved. Detroit Dirt is a food waste management/recycling business that turns your leftovers into someone else's garden patch. Bringing in food from office buildings, hotels, entertainment venues and even the Detroit Zoo, Pashon composts the waste downtown as a service, then sells compost to consumers. 

I met Pashon while photographing for one of her clients at the Cadillac Urban Garden downtown, sponsored by Ideal Group. We set up to do an environmental portrait that could be used for a number of things-versatile imagery. I had already conceptualized this shot before even knowing how the compost yard would look. 

This is how it looked. But bigger. This is the tip of one pile out of dozens that ran about 30 yards long, and over 7 feet high. Sometimes I have to roll around on the ground to get my favorite low angle shots. Not this time, not even an option. It had also just rained the day before, and while the weather had cleared up beautifully, the ground had not. 

Shooting with a single Profoto head into a PCB Parabolic (that took a tumble, snapped, but has since been repaired), I filled in Pashon's front with the light while letting the sun behind her create a nice front rim. Typically, I'd cross light and have the sources from two opposite directions, but this was a bit more natural of a shot and didn't need to have fancy rims and the like.

Dirt (and or the cleverly coined zoo-poo) was obviously the theme for our shots, even though the message of Detroit Dirt is rejuvenating and rebuilding downtown. In the early stages, I like the idea of brushing the dirt off and just getting started. Detroit has a long way to go, and Pashon is here making it happen. I just take the pictures. 

You can find out more about Detroit Dirt and the mission at their site here.

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Single Light Knockout

I've been using Profoto lights for over 5 years now, and I'm still in love with them. It's not that the light itself looks better than my other lights, per se, but I do find myself relegating my other heads to backdrop duty almost exclusively so I can put the Acute kit up front and center. 

Several blog posts have backed up this infatuation, mostly when it comes to using the bare Profoto dome as a modifier itself. Today's shoot required a bit more omph than even the bare light can provide, so we went with a basic reflector on a wide zoom. 

The punch from the light is phenomenal. We had to feather it way down to cover our foreground for other versions of this picture, and we still maintained a huge advantage over the sun that was almost directly in the frame. 

Doing test shots to warm up while the light comes lower.

I've used other lights with their included reflectors, and none of them, with their un-zoomable setups, come close to creating this kind of light. Just need to add more Profoto modifiers to the collection. 

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Announcing...

Yes, I shot my own engagement as it happened. It's hard to surprise your long-term girlfriend when she knows it's coming, but doesn't know exactly how or when. Birthday weekend and vacation coinciding definitely narrowed down the opportunity to just four days, so it took a little planning to keep it a secret till the last second.

Set on manual to expose for most of the sky, and on a tripod with shutter release going at 1//fps, I converted the photos into this .gif as a little way of sharing with our friends and family and clients the good news.
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Jolita Brilliant Shoot

One of my last shoots in NYC was done right in my neighborhood, West Harlem, with life fitness coach and prolific blogger Jolita Brilliant. I wanted to shoot some running as a followup to the work I did while out in Wyoming, which included these sweeping natural landscapes with a tiny runner in them.

A grittier, city-centric shoot came to be, planned around a highway overpass that had minimal traffic underneath, and was well away from areas that are more guarded by overzealous mall cop types.

I went easy on the modifiers, since we were walking to the shoot location. In fact, we ended up walking around 4 or 5 miles back and forth, playing with some different backdrops and lighting that the area had. Our warm up shots against this building were done with a fair amount of natural light creeping in from the river, less than 20 yards away. The metal siding on the building was fun to bounce light around on, and let me sneak a strobe in there while still looking surprisingly natural.

The final list of modifiers was the magnum reflector shown above and...nothing. The bare bulb continues to be a versatile light, especially in mimicking, adding to, or balancing sunlight. And shooting around 5 in the afternoon, we had a lot of sunlight from the west side of the city, right on the river.

We even squeezed in some no-light shots as the sun went down, with some cool shadows coming through the arches of this ironwork overpass. I've finally come to terms with natural light, and while I'll still go to Profoto right off the bat, sometimes you can do a lot with a little, or nothing at all. 

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Damn Ugly Adobe

From Damn Ugly Photography-Brad Trent, whom I assisted while living in NYC, is a blistering indictment of Adobe and it's practices in pricing, licensing, and now delivering via the cloud its software. 

His post nails it on the head as to why we should as photographers and other creatives tell Adobe that we don't want to license our software every month. Since Adobe is by far and away the first choice in photo manipulation, we may be held captive-but only if we slavishly update our software. 

Check out Brad's post and make your voice heard via the We The People and Change.org petition websites. Most importantly, make your dollars heard and spent on other software until Adobe remembers that it serves US as customers. 

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Studio Setup

As a prelude to an upcoming announcement, I have a simple setup post to share. Drawing on experiences while I was at Hearst Publications, using a light underneath a layer of plexiglass with an elevated piece of regular glass as a shooting surface gives you a beautifully controllable way to shoot certain products on white.

While a white sweep and plexi (also a part of this setup) is great for shooting free-standing products, some things just need to be shot top down for various reasons. It can effectively be used on many other items as well, for a different perspective. I've used this setup for bottles to put the air bubble in front of the glass for a 'hey, wait a minute' reaction from people who expect the bottle to be standing upright.

These insects are laid out to be displayed flat in frames, and none of them will stand upright on their own. Shooting flat was the only option. And while I've shot lots of products that gain depth and dimension from a shadow underneath them, these needed a pure white background for web. Nuking an item with a large softbox overhead is a possibility, but can also necessitate some cleanup and tweaking.

While first trying this out, you may be tempted to put your item right onto the backlight plexiglass and fire away. However, that extra layer of glass, with spacers underneath, makes a huge difference. The black cards are on the plexiglass and they control the flare that would otherwise wash out the sides and edges.

You want to constrain the item with cards all around, and as close as possible. If all the light is coming from directly underneath, it isn't hitting the sides. Then your main light, or lights, do the heavy lifting and let you sculpt and shape however you like.

In essence, we've taken a typical product sweep and flipped it 90 degrees back. Just make sure you set your exposure 1/3 to 1/2 stop brighter than the reading on the glass alone. This ensures a 100% white background, without overexposing the image from backlight alone.

This should be your final result (creepiness and number of legs may vary). 

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Keeping Creative

If I were to use the phrase 'photographers block', I'm certain I would neither be the first, nor maybe even using the right term to describe what happens when you hit that wall, and can't come up with a single thing to shoot.

But it happens, the same as all creatives run into mental blocks one time, a dozen, or every day of their careers until they get around it, maybe to only find the next obstacle. Photography may be unique from some art forms in that it's both internal and external. You can have the best idea ever, but no means to execute it. Or, you could have all the equipment your heart desires, but nothing to use it on. We rely on internal ideas, and our environments to create our work.

Shooting tabletop as often as I have been these past months has given me a new host of challenges every day, for which I'm grateful. But at the end of the day, feeling somewhat drained and uninspired by pictures of products on white sweeps, I was having trouble getting out to do something different.

There are thousands of photographers offering hundreds of thousands of ideas to get you out and moving, but underneath the inspirational messages, I saw the same words. "Just go DO something." But thats the hardest thing to do on occasion, to get up, grab the camera, and enjoy it.

It took a cross country road trip, and a return to the west coast to remind me that I do in fact enjoy my job, and that the whole world is out there waiting for someone, anyone, to try something interesting. I had to remember that if its all been done before, it can't hurt to do it again, and that eventually I might be the first to do that one cool thing that escaped under the radar.

So for those of us who experience photographers block, or maybe dark cloth? you can read inspirational quotes and posts all day and get a million ideas in your head, but getting out there to do them is where we can all fall apart. I stopped carrying my camera with me every day once I had to for work, feeling like it was more of a bother. That's the block talking. This shot, from inside the airport, wouldn't have been done if I had given in, said I was tired from shooting all week, and left my camera buried deep in the bag.

Instead, it opened me up to a whole world of photography that I want to continue exploring, unleashed a flood of ideas that I pulled into every other category of work I do, and got me excited to be out and about, camera in hand, finger on the shutter.

The block will bring you down and make you feel like it isn't worth doing anymore, you have to find what will make you enjoy it again, not cave your head in thinking of one specific thing to accomplish. Try a new subject, a new edit, or even browse through your own catalog, critique your work, and do it over again. Let ideas come organically from yourself, and then match it to your existing environment.

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