Chris Taylor's TD&P Blog

My cousin Roxanne needed some photos of her daughter this last weekend. Roxanne’s agent is putting some stuff together to try and get Gabby into some ads for Forever 21.

Roxanne needed the session done fairly quick & processed even quicker so they could head up to L.A. this week. So I packed up the strobes and headed out for the session. Luckily, their living room is quite spacious so we were able to shoot in the house. I haven’t done many “clamshell” lighting setups so I figured this would be a good time to try it out set it up. Setup was fairly quick and I like the lighting. Processing included mainly taking care of the stray hairs that were made even more prevalent from the hair light. I also lightened up the eyes a bit to bring them out a little more.

Thanks to Rob for showing up to help out and provide the backgrounds. He was looking pretty haggard from Vegas and I’m surprised glad he showed up.

Get it right in camera

These 3/4 shots were the toughest part of the session. Why??? ‘Cause I am not comfortable posing hands. It’s another thing I plan on studying more and working with ’cause it is such a pain in the ass for me. The background was also creased and that took the longest time to edit in post. I ended up blurring the image and then created a layer mask to smooth out the creases. I didn’t realize how time consuming it was until I looked at the clock and realized it was 3a.m. Whew! Lesson learned in why getting it right at the camera is a time saver. I could’ve moved her farther away from the background but that would have made sense. I’m not too bright sometimes. Oh well. Lesson learned.

Things learned from this session:

Learn to pose hands
Creases are not fun to fix in PS
Our kids are growing up faster than we think

Thanks, Gabby & Roxanne for a fun session. Thanks also for your patience. I hope you enjoy the images and good luck in L.A. this week.

Until next time…

I worked on an image tonight of a product we designed at work. This was my first Test Interface Box design collaboration. My boss wants me to start taking our product shots so I figured I would play around with this one a little bit.

I ended up having to do some selective PS in order to darken the top lid. I wasn’t able to get some of the blue to come through on the original shot (Figure 1) as I exposed for the front panel which almost blew out the top. Luckily there was still enough information in that section so I could use a levels adjustment to darken it up a bit so I could add the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (Figure 2).

Figure 1 - All Images Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

Figure 2 - All Images Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

You’ll notice that I didn’t pay any attention to the light tent as I knew I would be pennin’ around the test box body to make the selection of the test box to insert into the background file.

I also added some text to the final version as we are “selling” our services to our engineering department. I wanted to give it an ad type of look. I thought the version without text was missing some extra ummmpphh! (Figure 3).

Figure 3 - All Images Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

And here’s the final image. We’ll see what the boss thinks.

Final Image - All Images Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

As always, comments are welcome.