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Hollywood Glamour photography

I have always been intrigued and impressed by the Hollywood glamour photography of George Hurrell and decided to work a project to emulate it. We are all familiar with the wonderful images of Hollywood stars and the wonderful images.

It appears Hurrell worked in the days before strobe and he used large tungsten lights with large format cameras. I’m doing this project with strobe lighting and my DSLRs. I do have modeling lights in the strobes and was able to see about what I would get with the strobes, but it is alway a bit interpretive when using strobes. I set up in my home studio and used one key light and a hair light sometimes. I had the models point their face almost directly at the key light to emulate Hurrell’s lighting.

I had gathered a bunch of inspirational image that I likes and had them on a “mood board”. The models and I decided which images to use for inspiration .

My sister Mary Simmons did hair and makeup in the kitchen.

After the shoot I converted the images t black and white and did basic retouching.

Infrared landscapes

Examples of infrared landscapes using my dedicated/converted infrared Nikon D7000 camera. It was a nice early fall day and I went to Independence Oaks in Clarkston, MI to shoot. I walked the path just inside the park that leads to and past the camping area. The path from the lot has a wide elevated walkway over a wetland area. The path then turns to the west and has another elevated walkway over more wetlands and a small stream. The path farther on leas to a dry section of wood where I shot the panorama.

The reason I have a dedicated infrared camera is because the mirror fell off my D7000. I knew the camera had close to it’s limit of actuations, so I found a company that would remove the infrared filter and glue the mirror back on. If you have ever shoot infrared with a standard DSLR and an infrared filter you know you get very long shutter speeds with the filter that is almost black. Having the filter removed gives me ISO 200 performance at 100 ISO setting. That means I can shoot hand held and get good results. Infrared light focuses at a different spot from visible light, so I have to make adjustments to the focus. I need to run through a bunch of lenses and note the difference.

The unedited file from the camera is VERY red and has very little color information. I have had limited success in getting an image that has a full range of color. These images are primarily b&w with some split timing added in Lightroom. There are a couple panoramas in this post. They are handheld, vertically oriented images stitched together in Lightroom. I’m please with the strange unearthly quality of the images and keep the camera in my car most days and take it on most road trips.

High School Sports team banner, 2019 Clarkston girls basketball

Another example of a high school sports team banner. This one for the varsity girls basketball team for their 2019, 2020 season. The team chose a similar banner to what they did last year, captains up front with the rest of the players stacking behind, Flying V. This year I chose to add a bit of glow coming from the background as in some previous banners.

The process to make a banner like this is to plan the layout and lighting, choose the images and then composite. We wrote down the layout of all the players left to right and shot them in that order. I shot the players on the left side mostly facing to the left and the players on the right facing right. Most of the girls had basketballs. We shot most players left, center and right for variety. The lighting was a key light with an umbrella above and just to the right and a back light kicker high and to the left. This is a pretty serious team so they chose to so be not so girly girl and went with stoic serious poses and expressions.

After choosing each players’ image I selected them in Lightroom, made adjustments and opened in Photoshop. In Photoshop each player was cutout and brought into the background file and arranged in a pleasing manner. Shadows under the feet and on the floor we’re added.

The file was sent to Printboys Digital in Auburn Hills and the 5 foot by 10 foot banner hangs in the gym now.

Thanks to Leo’s Coney Island for their sponsorship

Kitchen Real Estate Photography

This is a Kitchen Real Estate Photography post. A networking friend from Clarkston Coffee Club, Chris Klemos recently did a remodel of this kitchen in Lake Orion, MI. He asked for some photos for an upcoming ad for his company Americal in ZZZ .

The kitchen was very clean and only needed some very minor clutter removal. I found what I thought was the best overall angle for the kitchen, set up the tripod and started to build the shot. I first got a good base exposure for the interior and set my camera to shoot additional images brighter and darker – bracketing. I then tested and set the off camera flash for fill light. I shot 3 to 5 exposures for each image.

I used Lightroom to create HDR versions for each image. I found the best color balance for all the shots, made some contrast and level adjustments and applied those settings to all the images. I then went back and painted darker and warmer exposures for the exteriors seen through the windows. When shooting I do my best to have the camera back as vertical and level as possible. The situation and my attention do not alway allow perfectly align, vertical images. I had to play with rotating the image and adjusting with some of Lightroom’s perspective controls. The result is level images without tilting or conversing lines.