As for this week, I’ve had some mixed results. I already wrote about the guitar shots (many of which were amazing!), and between now and then I captured four more sets of shots, which I have mixed feelings about. The shot below represents the first of these sets. I’m fairly pleased with it, and the lighting turned out better than I thought it would. The composition isn’t quite what I hoped for, though. The idea is that the subject is holding some sort of glowing entity in her hands, but you can’t see enough of the glow on her hands to consistently get that idea. It’s a little easier to see when the picture is larger, but I may nevertheless want to reshoot this and fix the problem. Also, as of now this photo represents the entire set, so I want to develop some ideas to make the concept more elaborate and involve more pictures. Those may be in by next week, so stay tuned.
Two of my other sets were a bit rushed, so I’m not as pleased with them. My lighting wasn’t perfect for the second set, which was themed to creativity, but it’s adequate. If I had more time, I might have tried to diffuse the light more or bounce it off of some surface above the camera so I didn’t get so much glare, but alas, I was hurrying too much to do that.
I dunno, part of me likes it anyway. True, it’s not what I pictured, but I still think I captured the spirit of the concept, maybe even in ways I hadn’t considered. I had wanted these shots to look incredibly clean and organized, and they’re still organized and relatively clean, but the fact that there’s a bit of hard glare and even a little noise (I accidentally shot on 1600 ISO!) lends itself to a harder, grittier aspect of art and creativity.
I imagine that I’ll do a little Photoshop work to clean up the shadow at the top of the picture and make that area more even, and I definitely need to cut out some of the glare on the protractor. No kidding, it looks horrible!
Anyway, on to the next set. My intention was to shoot a subject looking gloomy and depressed in the backseat of a car in order to capture the emotion of (what else?) depression. I was waiting for a cloudy day so that the gray clouds would match the theme, and lo and behold come Tuesday I got one. Then, to my chagrin, the sun came out right as I was setting up. Curse you sun!
Irregardless, my subject showed up, so I decided to go ahead with it, and the shots actually don’t look too bad. I did a little post work to bring down the colors and warm tones, which helps the pics out a lot. In fact, in the shot below you can’t even tell that the sun was out (and I guarantee that it was!) So I lucked out this time.For this set, arrangement on the page is going to be a big deal. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the shots exactly the way I wanted them in order to achieve the arrangement I had in mind. I was afraid that sort of thing would happen considering how hard it is to shoot in a car. Hopefully things will work out anyway, but I won’t really know until I actually go in and do the book work next month. We’ll see…
I don’t have anything to show for my fourth and final set as it requires a lot of Photoshop work. The concept behind the set was to have playing cards slowly floating down through the air against a black background, and that turned out to be really hard to capture on camera. I tried throwing the cards in the air in front of the camera, which didn’t work at all. If I was lucky, I could see a couple of white streaks in the frame. So instead I took pictures of each individual card held in a “floating” position. I’m currently in the process of cutting out each card that I want, cleaning it up, then compositing against the black background shot I took. So far it’s looking good, but I’ve still got a little ways to go. It’ll be done soon.
So as of now, I’ve got a quick shoot over the weekend and maybe a reshoot next Tuesday. In between, I’m sporadically doing Photoshop work and slowly getting this thing done! I made a lot of progress in the past week, so here’s for the final push!
T.H. Excellence
2 comments:
I like the first shot, looks very warm, and the glow in her hands looks a little mysterious.
The last shot I thought could be better as a black and white shot, have you thought of trying that?
I like the first picture a lot. I can't wait to see the one with the cards. It sounds really interesting.
-Excellent Sister
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