I’ve been back in the kitchen playing with living images and working on my cooking and baking… Grabbing a few shots things that always seem to catch my eye. I’ll add them as I see them.

I notice a little gitter in the mask of where my motion meets the still of the honey dipper… Will have to work on a better way to feather the mask of the motion frames to the still. The color palate is so small on a gif, need to figure out a beter way to handle that. Always see some banding and blocking of tones. Always see things that can be improved on every image/shoot, but that is how I know I’m still really into my work. If I thought there wasn’t any room for improvement or ways to do something a little better, then I shouldn’t be doing the work. At least this is how I think of it.

Any of you have ideas of living images you would like to see done? Always enjoy a creative challenge from friend!

Hennessy wanted to use his style to do a moody bottle shot for their next ad campaign. The shoot was a blast to work on. Since I’m usually so technical and product photography based it was great working with Jeff.  He directed where he wanted highlights and gradations and I would light it for that. Then he came in with his little bag of tricks to sort of play in front of the lens. Working all the little pieces of plastic and glass infront of the camera to get the effects he wanted. Most of our days where spent playing with all the little light refraction toys, flashlights, holiday string lights, and plastic fern things. It was such a nice change and reminder to break the rules sometimes. I’m usually such a clean shooter that this was a nice forced to play and get amazing results. The final images are going to look great and I’m excited to see them when they are out.

Hennessy was a great client too, so open to letting the creativity just flow. They had hero angles of the bottle that we had to match, and a basic idea of the feeling they wanted. Then let Jeff just sort of run from there. After we wrapped on the final day they even opened up a bottle for us all to toast to a great three days of shooting! They also gave us each a beautiful bottle to take home. Thanks Hennessy

So Thursday and Friday I worked on a Bombay Saphire shoot for my book, working on doing both a print shot and then figuring a way to make it into a living image for the web. Here is what we ended up with. I didn’t shoot any video, just made individual frames in photoshop. Mainly because the flames/vapors are heavily photoshopped ink drops in water. I’m thinking maybe double the frames and smaller movements on the flames/vapors with a little opacity change between them would make it a lot smoother and more fluid.

So now that I have a bottle of Hennessy from the shoot I’m thinking to do my own version of the ad and again make a print and living image version… I’ll post that up next week.

Continuing with my new love of boats after my recent charter trip through the Caribbean islands with my brother and sister-in-law. I got the opportunity to shoot a few interiors of a brand new Lebreton yacht last week. It’s a fully carbon fiber boat, hull and all. The boat was the new sig45 and is now on its way down to be handed off to it’s new owner in Puerto Vallarta Mexico.

It was a pretty busy day shooting the few interiors, they were still doing a fair amount of work on the boat to get it finished and ready to sail on Saturday. But we seemed to be able to all work around each other and get out to do a test sail in the afternoon for a few hours. Which was a blast! She moves through the water so smooth and quickly got up to 18knots and it wasn’t all that windy out! I have to say for being a more race inspired boat, she definitely has lots of room and luxury! The cabins below where actually very spacious, and we of course still wanted to give the images that feel of even more space to relax in!

Well I’m back in the studio this week, wishing I could have talked them into giving me a lift down to Cabo! I tried to sell them on the idea that the first voyage needed to be documented, but guess we’ll have to wait for the 80 foot version to be finished. Hopefully that one needs to be delivered to the Caribbean!

Definitely check it out! I’ll be heading to the coffee house later today to add a few living images on there.

Working on more living images. Still having some small color gamut issues that you can just see in some of the shadows and edge of espresso pour. Looking back on this one I should have shot it with a faster shutter speed (1/200th or maybe even 1/500th) to help define the edges of the pour. I shot it at 1/40 @f4. Would have made the mask cleaner and easier to paint. Which would have also made the pour smoother in the final image itself.

Working on more in the food/still life realm since that’s what I love.

I went out to the Venice Beach stake park yesterday just before sunset to shoot another living image. Thought the park would definitely have some action that I could selectively pick from. See how things worked in a non-studio environment for this. Was just starting to frame up when I saw the shadows moving on the pool wall. Quickly hitting record to catch it and then shot a few of the stills and thought I think that’s it. Would say that it would have been nice to grab a nice clean shot of a skater riding up the wall. Tomorrow maybe….

I have to work on my GIF color palettes and working in the 256 color range. I’m pretty sure that whats causing the blocking in the shadows and the sort off color moving pixels. Will have to figure that issue out on the next one.

This weekend  I started playing with what I call Living Pictures, otherwise known as cinemagraphs. It’s a merge of stills and motion that is looped and can be posted  online as a picture and without the need of a video player . One of the things really draws me to this technique is that we can selectively pick what moves and what is frozen in the moment. Bringing the views attention to what the creator wants them to really see or focus on.  It reminds me of the little girl in red from Schindler’s List. Here is a little clip i found on YouTube. Having the little girl in red and everything else in black & white helps draw your attention to her. Making you focus on her even in the wide shots were lots is going on, your eyes search to find her.

The post work for this technique is a little foreign to me so I just set up a simple studio shot to work thru the technical steps to get it to work. Here is what I ended up with. I think the post work still needs some fine tuning, to make it a bit smoother and seemless. I will work on that with the next few shots. Once I’ve worked out all the kinks I will do a video post on how I shoot and do the post work.

I love roaming thru ONE EYELAND where I found this image.  There is some great work on there from around the world. This image is by Elena Vizerskaya.  The attention to detail is great. I love the oversized water droplet splash as the tears pour in. How the blood disperses as hits the water right below her wound. The far right jellyfish just wraps as it bumps into her leg. These small details in the retouching is part of what makes this image so amazing. Making the surreal seem so real.   I also found her Facebook page and her blog, which is in Russian. She has “I want what I see and see what is not”  written at the top of her blog and I have to say I also really like that too.

Hope you enjoy this image and take a look at some of her other work. Enjoy the weekend!

Just remembering those days when I could drink a nice cold one… Though a brew master friend of mine has told me of a few breweries that do a decent gluten free beer. They’ve been put on the Whole Foods grocery list!