Daily Juice – Painting with light and shoes

Posted by kevin focht on Mar 30, 2012 in How to's and manuals, Lighting | 0 comments

I recently got asked to give shooting some shoes a try. Portland is a huge sporting shoe market, and I would love to do some shooting for some of the companies here. This was a really great test, so I was all game.

When it comes to shooting people, I have everything down. I don’t even have to think about it anymore, as I have been doing it so long. Objects on the other hand, I need to really think about. It’s a whole different realm, and takes a lot of thought and planning..

This first shot is a base exposure using a large soft box over head and backlit. This will be the basis for my painting with light.

The big problem with shooting shoes, is to get every little area lit. All the details have to show and be lit properly. There are a lot of ways to do this. I know shooters who will take days setting up lights, mirrors and reflectors to get the image in one shot.

Part of shooting something new is doing your research. I have a pretty big pool of photographic friends to pull from. I feel very lucky and blessed by this. I did some phone calls and found out that the better shoe shooters in town, combine shots in Photoshop using masks and paint with light to get the details lit. Perfect, now I just need to figure out my technique.

I know my base exposure ( the shot above) and then I just needed to paint in my highlights using my expensive light painting tool!

And my expensive modifier for my expensive tool.

So here is the trick to what I did. I needed a long exposure to be able to paint with light, so the room had to be dark and no modeling lights. I stuck my camera on a tripod and locked it down. I shot with a 4 second shutter speed and had the flash pop when I fired the shutter. Then I just painted in the area I wanted to highlight.

Here is the bottom middle highlight

Top right

bottom right

Top right logo

Toe

After taking all these shots, I just combined them in photoshop using layer masks and then painting in the highlights from the images I needed.

Here is the final image I came up with by combining all the shots above.

When the job comes through, I will spend even more time painting each little detail in and combining more shots.

Kevin

Body shots – How

Posted by kevin focht on Feb 17, 2012 in How, How to's and manuals | 1 comment

I have started shooting some fine art nudes and portraits as a personal project lately. These are the type of projects you need to do, just to keep your creative juices flowing. I am trying to push myself with the type of lighting i am using. I want to explore just what I can do with two 30 inch strip lights. i am also doing no post processing, except for the one lightroom preset I have chosen. No photoshop, just straight out of the camera and then output using this preset. No color or exposure adjustment, I am going old school and doing it all in the camera and with lighting.

You can see from the lighting set up, that it is pretty basic. I have one strip light soft box on either side of the model. In this particular shot, I stretched some thin plastic painters plastic in front of the model. The key to this set up was to have the model right up against the plastic, but not have any light hitting the plastic. Not a small feat, I might add. If any stray light would hit the plastic, you would pick up all the wrinkles in it and i wanted an etherial feeling to these shots.

What I am finding, is that it is all about angles with this type of lighting. Every person needs something a tad different. That is the part that I am loving, exploring what I can do with just this one light set up.

As photographers and artists, I think we don’t spend enough time exploring what one thing can do before we move on. It’s more of an instant gratification culture now, and I think we are missing a lot by not pushing ourselves.

You can see more of my work at my new personal site TheOriginalOrange.com

Rainy Day No Problem “How”

Posted by kevin focht on Feb 6, 2012 in How, How to's and manuals | 0 comments

Every get one of those shoots where it is pouring down rain outside. You don’t want to cancel because it will just add to your already busy schedule.

Do what I do, bump up the ISO and look for open shade!

Let’s break down this shot. I am in a building that has a loading dock on part of it with a covered area. Perfect place to shoot a portrait with open shade. Now obviously if it is raining, we are going to bump up the ISO. I shot this at 1000 ISO, and knowing that the largest it will be printed is probably a 16×20, I knew it wouldn’t be an issue.

By placing her against the window with the background, I was able to use what was there to make the shot more interesting. The walls inside the building are a sort of mustard color. The inside is also lit with light bulbs, so they are tungsten which makes it warm. Perfect, we need some warmth in this shot. It almost looks like I used a cool background projection on this, but this was just using what was available. Don’t make it harder, find some cool place with an overhang and use whatever you can with the background. I shot this with my 70-200 f2.8 at 2.8.

The hardest part of this whole thing was making sure I didn’t fall off the edge of the loading dock!

The next time it’s raining, look for nice covered areas with open shade. That way you don’t have to reschedule!

Kevin

“How” Shards of light

Posted by kevin focht on Feb 3, 2012 in How | 1 comment

Creating something out of nothing with glowing beams of light.

Lighting with shards of light coming through an image is not as easy as it looks. This shot was from an editorial that we shot in the basement of my building. We had a whole circus set built, and then needed to light the set when there was no lighting at all. Once again, I used fresnel hot lights, as it was easier to see what I was doing.

The other reason I used hot lights, was because the art director wanted grain. It would have been really hard to get strobes at a low enough power to be able to get grain from high iso.

One of the things with showing shards of light, is that you need a fairly dark background and something in the air to reflect the light. In this case we used smoke in a can spray. I wanted to backlight the model, so I used a reflector (oh did I just say that) to fill on camera right.

One of the keys to using smoke machines or smoke in a can, is that you need to spray it and then let is settle a bit. If you don’t, then you can see how you sprayed it and it didn’t look real.

As for exposure, you can see that I exposed off the face again, and then let the highlights go. I think we did a pretty good job of making it look like daylight, even though we were in a really dark basement.

Kevin

New to Focht Creative – ” How “

Posted by kevin focht on Feb 2, 2012 in How, How to's and manuals | 0 comments

We are starting a new series of posts on Focht Creative called “How” as in how in the world did they do that!

We will start with some basics and as we get going, we will be doing more complex.

Here is the way we will approach this.

First we will show the photo, and then we will explain how it was set up, the thought process and what special equipment might have been used.

The shot…

This is a shot I did for an editorial a few years ago. It was all about a semi-famous girl who was getting married, but actually had another woman who was in love with her. Funny concept I know, but you have to start somewhere with a story line.

The issue with a shoot like this, was that it was all inside and there were some really large areas that needed to be lit. Some of the shots needed to look like paparazzi shots, and others needed to be light really pretty.

This shot was done in an elevator that we held open. I love fairly harsh light in my work and always have. It just adds drama. I also love to use fresnel hot lights whenever I can. I just love the old hollywood feeling to them.
Here is what a fresnel hot light looks like.

So the basic lighting set up was pretty simple on this one. One fresnel head up high and slightly to camera left.

The main issue with a shot like this, is to just make sure the shadows fall in the right place. You also can use the focusing ability of the fresnel to control just how much contrast you have in the shot and how hard the shadows are. If you zoom out the shadows become more like a hazy sunny day, if you zoom the head in, it becomes more like direct sun.

This was more like hazy sun, and in the end it worked out nice. The beauty of using hot lights, is that you see what you get. There is no guessing.

Kevin

How to shoot a business portrait

Posted by kevin focht on Feb 1, 2012 in How to's and manuals, Lighting | 0 comments