photoshop

Shirley’s Portrait of Her Growing Family

Family portraits are incredibly fulfilling for me to create. A well-made family wall portrait brings joy to people for years if not decades. And Shirley’s family had grown quite a bit since I’d last photographed them. It was neat to see everyone, to hear about their lives as I photographed them, and I always find it especially fun to get little children to not just relax, but to smile and laugh for a portrait.

We had talked earlier about doing a large canvas panorama of her family above her couch, and this is the final image.

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It’s a little hard to see all the great faces online, so I made this 15 second video to show the big group.

Because Shirley and her husband were leaving on a religious mission for a while out of the country, the large canvas pano would have been hard to take with them. So I used the individual family groups to create this square wall collage.

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And here are some of the individual families. They were each shot individually for the panorama so that they could each get their own portrait, but it also made it easier on the family’s time constraints, as well as making the most of my custom style of lighting. I have a lot of space and options here in my Utah studio, but even a family this large makes for a very tight fit if I were to try and shoot everyone at once all in the studio. But shooting each family separately, we were able to create something much more unique and artistically pleasing, plus it helped the family because there were some members that couldn’t be there all at the same time. Everyone was coming and going throughout the shoot, and we never had everyone in the studio all at the same time. And it all worked perfectly.

As you view these families, notice how comfortably everyone is grouped together in each portrait, and how great each kid looks.
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Family portraits are one of the most important images we can create. I believe strongly in a great family portrait, and now is a great time to get your family in the studio for a portrait.

Give me a call at 801-728-3317, and until next time, America.

My “Company Party” Christmas Card

Merry Christmas, everyone! This year I re-used my previous card because it took so much work to create it originally. It’s a group portrait of me, taken at my company Christmas party.

Cox-Christmas-2013-Card-Design-2-finalChildren especially have told me that they like my cards and can’t figure out how I can be in so many places at once. To see how it was made, check out my original post that explains all of the time-consuming details.

I love that this holiday is about people taking the time to go out and specifically shop for others. It’s a great time for selflessness, and a time to remember the reason for the Savior. I hope all of you have a joyous season with family and loved ones. Merry Christmas!!

And until next time, America.

Band Portraits for Ryan Shupe & the RubberBand

This week Ryan Shupe & the RubberBand put on a show outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, and we used the opportunity to shoot some new band portraits. These kinds of images are used for posters, marketing, web sites, and overall band promotion.

Band portraits need to be iconic, visually interesting, they need to show the vibe of the band so that you know what a live show will be like. Band portraits need to show personality, they can’t be mundane or normal. So all of that means that band portraits are no different than any other portrait I create for people – they need to have exquisite lighting and emotion.

For this image, I envisioned the band on stage with Ryan up front looking right into the camera. I wanted instruments showing and also all the feel of the stage with the stage lights and smoke – except it’s not possible to do a shot like that during the show with an amphitheater full of people. It had to be shot during the day before the show. So I set it up, lit the scene, and shot it knowing I’d be recreating from scratch the entire “feel” of the stage later in post production.

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Above is the final version after all the digital work. And below, is an animation of my progress. In the animation it may come together in just a few seconds, but it didn’t take seconds to make.

Notice how in the first and completely raw shot, the skin tones and lighting on the individuals is perfect, but it’s in the middle of the day. It doesn’t look like night and there are no stage lights. From there I slowly build it up, painting in from scratch the stage lights, the atmosphere, the smoke, as well as the effects of the colored lights on Ryan, his jacket, on the band, and on the walls. I’m constantly asking myself, how would this light affect the scene? Where would it be visible? Because of where Ryan is standing, he is being lit with the most diverse set of colored lights from various places. How those lights all skim across his black leather jacket have all been painted in.

The result is something both real and natural to the eye, but also is a shot that could not have been created otherwise. It’s an impactful image.

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This second band portrait was created to look real and natural, to be impactful, and to also show the energy of the group. But it wasn’t originally shot like this either.
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To create it, I individually lit and shot each band member separately. I then took the best of each individual and put this together, lining up each brick and line in the background to match the bending perspective shift created by my camera’s angle and lens choice. I really liked the wide angle feel and the bending of the bricks created by that. There was a lot of very small and detailed painting needed to get all of these image to seamlessly blend together, and for shadows to fall where they should, and for the creation of shadows and mixing shadows. But the end result is a really cool and iconic band picture.
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Here it is in color too before the final conversion to black and white. This color image could work for a lot of purposes when color is required, though in the black and white I did multi-tone it so that it grabs the eye even in b&w.
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I was also hired to shoot some concert images during the show later, and I’ll get to posting them soon too. But for as much time as these took to create, I wanted to post today about these these band photos and what really goes into sometimes just one or two commercial images.

There are lots of commercial needs for great photos, some that require almost no Photoshop and post-production and some (like these) that require a lot. My specialty is lighting and emotion and I’m on the Adobe software team training photographers all over the country on advanced clean and natural Photoshop techniques. So for all your commercial imaging needs, give me a call at 801-728-3317. Tell me what business you’re in and what you’d like and let’s make it happen. Let’s create some iconic images for your business that make you shine.

And until next time, America.