LPS 9 Behind-the-Scenes
indiegirl
Registered Users Posts: 930 Major grins
Share your outtakes, how-to's and what-for's here!
We want the behind-the-scenes scoop. Be sure to include a link or shot of the image you actually entered, too!
Jesse
We want the behind-the-scenes scoop. Be sure to include a link or shot of the image you actually entered, too!
Jesse
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you're such a great fun, I'm so happy you've joined dgrin!
Here's what I entered (click thumbnails to see larger images)
I considered going b/w, but liked the emotional tone of the sepia. I wanted to convey a timeless quality to the shot.
We also did some with a baby, but decided to go with the less-is-more approach.
This was my first time staging a shot, aside from the work I do for theatres. I worked with actors but found it really difficult to draw out the emotion from the male model like I wanted--he is such a nice guy! The intense emotion I was looking for never really came across except for the one shot I entered.
Posing for a shot is much different from portraying a character and I could tell he struggled with the artifical quality of the set up. Still, some very usable shots and the outcome was pretty much what I was going for.
I came up with the shot idea driving home one night. Pearl Jam's Better Man was on and I knew what I needed to do! I've had the song in my head for weeks now.
I really liked working toward a well-defined idea. This was the first time I've done that for this contest and it was much easier. Also, I didn't ask for feedback this time and I missed the banter. I also didn't second-guess myself as much, so there you go. Six of one...
Thanks, my friend. Me, too.
Unfortunately, I came down with a wicked case of the flu, and spent much of the contest period convalescing.
Mid week however, I decided that I couldn't possibly not enter the contest, so I did the following.
1- I cut a swastika out of foamboard, and spray painted it. It sat out in the back yard for a few hours to dry, and I hadn't thought about the ramifications of that, so I may be known as the neighborhood white supremacist. Still, I'd rather face the wrath of the neighbors than that of my CFO as a result of getting paint on her floor.
2- My ex-military friend and I went knife shopping at the weekend flea market at the Meadowlands (outside giants stadium). That place is a trip.
3- I called my upstairs neighbor, who is a rather good painter, and cajoled her into agreeing to paint flags on people's arms.
4- I crassly traded beer and pizza for a half dozen of my friend's "volunteering" to be billboards, so to speak.
Where's my Pizza and Beer, Dammit!
My friend did her usual obsessive excellent job in the flags. It took her about 3 hours to do all 5- she even insisted on making every star in the US flag an actual star. this is Sunday night, so we were under time pressures. She would not, however, be hurried, and it was free labor, so I can't really complain.
Some tests shots, involving the "anti-fascist tamarind on a spoon" which was a little less intimidating than we had hoped.
Finally we got everybody prepped. My military friend insist that everyone hava appropriate knives; a sykes fairbarn for the brit, and Uzbek tribal knife for the soviet, an M-14 bayonette for the French and Chinese, and a K-bar (of course) for the American. In retrospect, its probably not a good idea to mix weapons, pizza, and beer.
In the end it was a tough choice which version to submit. I actually sent in the wrong one (I may have been a tad... more relaxed than usual).
#1, the one that got sent in:
#2- the one I actually like better:
I don't expect the photo to get a lot of traction, but we sure had a blast making it.
Oh my gosh! I thought you did that in photoshop! What an amazing story behind the photo, thanks for posting it.
http://www.twitter.com/deegolden
The original concept was zoomed way out. The idea was to have a desk in the foreground with two hands clenched atop it in focus. OOF in the background was about 3/4 of the body of the teacher scolding, cropped below the knees and above the nose. As I manipulated a composite of those two images, I realized the impact just wasn't there. I either needed to get closer and lower to the fisted hands or to the scolding finger. I tried zooming in on the fists first, but it was still ineffective.
In exasperation after no amount of PP or reshooting my original idea came to fruition, I severely cropped one of the "toss" shots around the scolding finger...and liked it. So I reshot all over again.
Final product
As I have no accomplises nearby, my shots consisted of me setting the timer, running around to the table I had set up for spot marking, and scolding my camera. I yelled "no" at it for a good hour. My neighbors probably think I'm crazy (I was shooting this in front of a huge picture window for the natural light).
My original idea came from some (second hand) stories I heard from people in the low security portion of San Quentin. For those of you who haven't seen it, San Quentin sits right on San Francisco bay (acutally San Pablo Bay, but that is splitting hairs for most of the world) and has a fabulous view of much of the Bay Area. The folks incarcerated there say one of the toughest things about the place is that view and how it puts freedom in your face every day. So, the idea I decided to go for was to try to catch that view of nearby freedom from the point of view of someone who doesn't have it. My imagined storyboard had my model (me in this case) looking out through a barred window at a gull flying free. If I had the time, I would have shot this at Alcatraz, but during the contest window I could only pull together about 3 spare hours to shoot, so I scaled that idea down to Fort Point.
Fort Pont, unfortunately has either glass or plexiglass over all the windows. Given combination extremely high constrast light and the not-so-tranparent windows, clearly representing anything outside was going to be tough. I saw the perfect opportunity for my idea when noticed a ferry outside one of the cannon ports. The ferry was moving pretty quickly so it was fortunate that I had my tripod already set up. I plunked the tripod down, set up and shot the ferry through the window. Of course, given the light contrast the interior was completely black, so I left the camera where it was, adjusted the exposure to reveal some interior detail, set up the timer and ran into the scene. At the end of the day I blended three exposures (over a 5 stop range) to get this:
You can see the nightmare that is that plexiglass window. You'll also notice that the focus is still on the ferry so the forground is a tad soft (should have refocused between exposures). In the end I finally nixed this shot because it didn't meet my quality standards and I couldn't get to the point where the image in the window didn't look pasted in to my eyes.
While I was there, I also took some shots by the the windows which orginally drew me to this location, all of which face away from the sea--this is a fort after all. It was foggy (when isn't it there?) and there was a lot of condensation not only on the windows but everywhere. Here is a shot of the room I was working in:
The mist on these windows was even worse than on the cannon ports (presumably because they are glass) so I didn't even try to recover any detail outside. I pulled the camera off way off to the left to limit my view of the sky (there is a hill outside to the right--if the window was clear most of what you would see is grass) to just a small square at the top, chimped the exposure until I was just recovering detail in the bars, set up the timer and, like before, ran into the picture.
The image out of camera had slightly warm tones inside from the red brick and cool tones outside from the fog. That felt backward to me so I used the split toning feature in Lightroom (without a B&W conversion--you can do that) to reverse the tones and give it a night-into-day feel. The only thing I did to this shot in Photoshop was shapen the web rez image and apply the watermark. Anyhow, here is the final result:
The story of the final image is a little less concrete than my orginal idea but think the mood still captures what I was after and I like the idea of leaving a bit more to the viewer's imagination.
Other that didn't make it either:
And at 6:30AM that next morningnight I remembered that there was a hotel nearby I'd stayed before, and wondered if my computer would remember the network and there not be a passcode.!
www.HoofClix.com / Personal Facebook / Facebook Page
and I do believe its true.. that there are roads left in both of our shoes..
Nat bad for a Nikon lens!:D
After I posted my first attempt at the balloon picture, I got some great feedback and suggestions, so I had been waiting for the right sky and me having time to try again. When I finally got a chance and the skies looked good, my wife and I ran to the store, purchased another round of inflated balloons and were about to start shooting again. I quickly checked over my camera settings to make sure I was ready and then we shot another sequence of balloon releases.
After taking the pictures, I realized I had overlooked some of the camera settings. I had overlooked the fact I had left my camera set to RAW from some experimentation the previous night. Still being a newbie to post processing (I usually shoot high quality jpeg and run some auto-options in Elements) I knew I was in trouble. While I had intentionally shot with an aperature of f/11 to get a large DOF, but I also mistakenly had the camera set to ISO 400 instead of ISO 200. This combined with the small aperature left me with a fairly dark image for a bright sunny summer Florida day. Here is the RAW picture converted to JPG without any other processing:
Oh and I had also cut off too much of my wife's hand.
So to begin damage control, I started playing with the Exposure, Brightness and Saturation settings in the RAW editor - since I had used ISO 400 and increased the brightness so much already, I was limited in how far I could go with the picture becoming very noisy. I finally was somewhat happy with my RAW tweaking and saved it to jpg. Then I played with the usual auto-options in Elements and got the colors looking better. Then I followed the advice and tips to take the hand from one of the previous round's pictures and replace the cut-off hand. I then ran Elements auto-options on just the hand, and then after more forum advice, feathered the hand to make appear less sharp. And after some cropping, I was done!
of the challenges for a chance to do a shelter dog entry. I felt this theme worked pretty well. It is my personal belief that there are two types of people who own dogs. Those who treat them as family members keeping them into old age and those who don't and end up dumping them at shelters so they can go on vacation, or move out of town, etc., etc. To me these people own dogs for the wrong reasons treating them as objects. This is why I feel the dogs are oppressed while awaiting freedom. Almost a dual theme....but I digress!!!! As usual, I didn't have much time. I took my boss with me on Friday as she has been 'thinking' about adopting a dog and we visited the county shelter. I don't know what I was thinking, the shots were more difficult than I expected. Positioning to capture the dogs eyes became the utmost importance and the rule of thirds, etc., went out the window. The kennels cast an ugly green color on top of that. yuck! My boss was attracted to the funny-looking little poodle mix that eventually became the subject of my entry. This was a very needy dog.
We saw some adorable dogs. She considered this sweetheart and even took him out to the holding area.
I found it difficult to take interesting angles, the cages were narrow and the bars naturally hid the eyes. The camera seemed to upset some dogs, and I didn't want that so I attempted to shoot from offside (which resulted in some crooked bars, oh well...). I wanted a certain look. Not a cute fuzzy dog, and also not one that was horribly abused which you see sometimes. I attempted to get a little context into the shot, even though the bars told the story, by trying to capture the locks. But the dog seemed so far away and small that I didn't even bother working it up until tonight. Now that I look at it, I like it quite a bit. This is what I was aiming for, but didn't think I really had.
When I viewed them in RAW, I wasn't too pleased, and the green cast was nasty. Here's the original out of RAW image.
I decided to work the poodle up in B&W. I basically converted it in channels and used curves to darken and a large paint brush to lighten the fur, several times until I achieved the look I wanted. I also used a vignette as subtly as I could. The dogs all pretty much had great reflections in their eyes which I selected and adjusted again with curves. I used several curve layers to get the depressing, darkness that I wanted to achieve and came up with this one. I really like how her coat looks and she has a very haunted look that told a story.
I originally posted a quote with the shot, which I removed before the challenge ended. The cool thing for me is, that this evening I worked up a lot of the images I took and put them in a special gallery and added quotes that I have gathered. So I now have a gallery that tells viewers a little bit about the kind of person I am and promotes Adoption! Please feel free to see the rest of the shots and read the quotes here.
This was a very satisfying challenge for me even though I didn't do too well!!! (Oh, and don't forget to Adopt!!!)
I came up with this idea after searching freedom and oppression on goggle images... I rushed this first take with my wife as the model, originally shooting her portrait with my hand and the pill in the shot... didn't like it so I shot both hands separately and inserted them in the image... I only had red pills so I had to color the one on the right blue... didn't come out the way I wanted... I really didn't think I would be able to get the emotional impact expected from this image I think everyone was expecting from the theme and I was kind of doubting weather it would fly... I asked for feed back... got a few comments... after which I new I should probably try something else...
Well, because I really liked the idea and the original from the movie Matrix, I decided to do a re-take, which I think came out much better than the original, but new in my heart it wouldn't make the top 10...
In the first take each portrait was a different shot and of course the hands... so there are 4 separate elements in the composite... In the one I submitted I used the same portrait on both sides and distorted them slightly to look like a concave reflection from the glasses... I used myself as the model for all of the below images...
There were some really great, thought provoking, emotional images in this round, Pyro’s being one of my favorites, unsure as to why it didn’t make top 10… of course I wasn’t judging the contest… I look forward to the next round...
Winston
Don't you think that the photo is slightly overexposed/burned outside ?
I thought in this instance that "Less was Best". I liked my angles, the curvature of the hat, against the curvature of the hair and faceline, the curvature of the word Dyke with the curvature of her breast, and although a Soft Focus, as indicated in my EXIF, my capture was not OOF. As said, I also liked the "Black and White" of the shirt and hat...When we are sure of something we always say...It's in Black and White.
I liked this shot, because most people envision a "DYKE" as a mean Tough Looking Lumberjack Female, in this instance we have a very feminine "DYKE" which also brings me to the oppression of being labeled in our societly, and something that brought to my mind, what my Mom taught me growing up...Never Judge a Book By It's Cover.....
As I stated to Justiciero, sometimes Art doesn't have to be in your face, you just have to read the art that is being displayed, and for this reason I chose my entry.
These are some of the "shots" I had selected for the round, before I chose my actual entry. I didn't post any of the following, cuz I didn't want to show "too" much skin and offend anyone, a couple I thought were pretty, but didn't have the strength of the message that was needed to portray the message. I had entitled these "Much More Than Friends".
BTW, I want to thank STIRFRY, I just read your thread, and I'm REALLY happy that you GOT IT!! GMTA
Thanks for reading my thoughts..
I have been very busy getting ready for my first photography show. Final shootings, narrowing choices, printing, and now framing. The show is Aug. 9, so at that time I'll share my photos for all to see. The theme is Wilderness Areas of the Allegheny National Forest, and I thoroughly enjoyed being in the woods, despite the coyotes howling and the bear growling at me....
I enjoyed watching this challenge - I think the competetition is getting stiffer!
Tessa
www.tessa-hd.smugmug.com
www.printandportfolio.com
This summer's wilderness photography project: www.tessa-hd.smugmug.com/gallery/3172341