Studio Photoshop

I photographed in a junkyard! Yes, a junkyard and I had a great time. A fellow photography and instructor from the Morean Art Center, Chuck Vosberg, set up a photo walk inside a auto junkyard. This was quite an experience as it was 93° outside and in the sun with a lot of Florida humidity, get the idea, it was really, really hot. We photographed for about two hours and probably lost 4 pounds of water in that time.

I was really excited about photographing in the junkyard, as I have been looking for textures to use in a photographic project I’ve been working on. Broken glass, wheels, rims and engines gave me a lot of the repetition and textures that I was looking for. I also found an old fire truck, and had a happy surprise finding a fireman’s hat sitting on the seat. I photographed at a couple ways as I’m going to try to use Photoshop’s hyper focus and see if I get the whole thing sharpe from front to back. But, it looks really cool and HDR two. There was his building that housed all the engines that were for sale, thank goodness I brought my tripod as I had some exposures going as long as 30 seconds.

Here’s some of the photos from the junkyard.

This past weekend Lee Burgess and myself led a photo safari for TA PPA in historic Ybor City. Lee is a commercial and fashion photographer in Clearwater, Florida and he was showing us some of his approaches to photographing models. We got one of the design students from the International Academy of Art and Design to furnish some of her design clothing for the model and Lee also supplied a slightly more racy outfit.

Now as you may know I am not a fashion photographer, so I made a few mistakes as I photographed Ashley. I learned that I have to set my ISO higher so that I could use a faster shutter speed and actually capture actually the model without any movement. When you have over 20 photographers trying to tack photos of a model you have to shoot quickly and then get out of the way, get stomp on. just kidding about getting stomped on, everybody was very courteous of each other.

I decided since I do a lot of HDR that I would convert some of these single images into HDR and then paint back in the model for a little bit more of a grungy or look. I’ll used use Nik software’s Silver Efex Pro and added a black-and-white copy of the HDR image, placing the image on top of the HDR image and change the blending mode to Soft Light. Doing this give the image a little bit more depth and feel that I just couldn’t get using just HDR only. I then stacked my original image on top of the other layers and painted back in the model’s face and wherever skin was exposed, but leaving the nylons alone on her leg.

Here are a few images from the photo shoot, and I want to thank Lee for all his help.