The best camera is the one you have with you. Part I

I rarely carry a fancy camera with me, and I never shoot film...too heavy, I might break it, expensive, hard to find, images came out blurry/overexposed/shaky, have no idea if I got the shot, oh I forgot to focus, the film was not expired enough...So many excuses for a bad picture or worse, no picture at all. But I stumble into moments worth remembering almost every day! Plus sometimes I 'see' the image differently from what it actually looks in reality. I am not interested in capturing what is 'really' happening, nor I think that using film gives me a more legitimate description of what I witness. So what should I do? I often end up using my iPhone and the interpreting the image using a combination of phone apps (CameraBag, Plastic Bullett and Instagram) and postprocessing with Lightroom.

I enjoy the almost Zen simplicity of capturing a moment with a simple camera with a fixed wide angle lens and where the only controls are white balance and exposure. The post processing
allows me to create the final image as I saw it in my mind. I find the process liberating.

In this and the next two posts I will show a few examples of images taken with this approach.

The Road: Outdoor shooting with the Softlighter

This shot is part of a small set of test images I have done using fashion from UK brand AllSaints. True to to their gritty/steampunk look I picked a Winter outdoor location on a nature reserve. The subject is designer Ian Obermuller, band member of Snowmanplan and creator of amazing animations. The dreary winter light we often have in the NorthWest made it easy to mix natural light with my flash. It was cold and windy and too keep things easy for my freezing assistant (hello Miss Van!) we shot with a simple, but trusted set up: Canon 580x II mounted inside a boomed Softlighter II with a gold insert. The flash fired at half power. ISO 100, 50mm, f4.5 1/200th sec. That gave me the cinematic look that I was looking for. What is our hero looking at?

The shot was then burned and dodged to bring out all the details of the scene in Photoshop 5. The color palette was created in Lightroom. To emphasize the dreary, post apocaliptic, 'this can't be good' look I emphasized the browns, greens and magentas.

You can see the full set on my website. The image has been picked by the fancy blog run by design pundit Chloe Scheffe.

What Art Directors want: AllSaints, Yokoo, bad boys, rich girls ...and Chanel.

I was recently having a conversation with a Seattle photo agent about things that commercial creative/art directors look for in a photography portfolio when they are hiring. This is the list we agreed on:

- shooting for your portfolio and so with a low low budget? Do not buy cheap things, borrow/return if necessary. Spend the money on a MUA/hairstylist (or trade if you can). Trade with local stores that have a web presence and require fresh images but do not have a budget specifically for that. They are also more innovative and will let you shoot the way you want it (try doing that with a paying client).

- shoot good quality/expensive items ...and make them look even more expensive.
Why? Because then you will get work for higher budget projects.

- do not shoot cute talent, shoot interesting/ethnic/publication worthy/expressive talent. I do not mind working with the same model a few times if he/she looks good on my images, especially for tests.

- do not shoot what is current now, but take a chance and try to predict what is going to be relevant in the near future in terms of looks, lighting schemes, palettes and topics. Scout on foreign magazines and websites and small photo/design publications for inspirations. If it's on Vogue or Lady Gaga says it's cool...it's already too late to be in your portfolio. I often ask designers for obscure sources of inspiration, they are good at that and have different eyes from those of a photographer, so they provide perspective.

So I wanted to shoot a portfolio image that summed up this conversation...

I like the fun challenge of location, but the weather is not great in February and it is good to brush up on the skills required for studio shoots, where everything has to be perfect and controlled (or at least fixable in post...ehm). To this I added the challenge of shooting at my studio,which is small and mostly designed for product shoots.


Ari (Filipino/Swedish heritage) is wearing a 'scowl' from Yokoo, an Atlanta based fashion designer who knits amazing pieces. Knitting is the new black...The oversized wool jacket is from All Saints (Now that the shoot is done I finally get to wear it) and the bag is a Chanel limited edition (borrowed from a large local store, thanks to 'Mr. Frederick'). I liked the idea of combining seemingly disparate styles into a common look/palette. The big topaz ring belonged to my grandma.


The lighting is simple: a flagged beauty dish powered by an Einstein 200w/sec, f16, ISO100 at camera left, soft fill light at -1.5 stops and a white board to the right. The postproduction uses different layers (high pass, paint daub and multiply....), to achieve a painterly look. Flagging was essential in a small space. Note to self: I need to get a grid for the BD.

What story does this image tell? Of a modern girl who can afford a classic bag, can mix it with a different style from a small, talented, up & coming independent designer to make it current and has a boyfriend with an urban sense of style from whom she just stole..borrowed a cozy wool jacket from a relatively new company, at least here in the States. It's a good story.

The Last from the Desert

Jenny and Colin have been good friends of mine since forever. They were founding members of the very dearly missed Circus Contraption. When I asked them if they wanted to be part of my "Strange Characters in Strange Places" series they gladly said yes. The shoot was inspired by the graphics on Trader Joe's brown bags (yes, the old West guy with a spyglass). This was the last shoot of my desert trip. The image was taken at sunset on the cliffs overlooking the Columbia River, nearby Vantage, WA. It was, well, a bit windy. OK so windy that Corinne (who's three years old) could not stand up outside and had to patiently wait inside the truck for her parents to finish shooting. I was hoping to use my usual 2 softboxes set up, but with that weather..forget it. However, the white van provided the ideal large reflecting surface for a cranked up Alien Bees Einstein. Chloe "Flare Master" Scheffe bravely held a Speedlite as the key light on Jenny and we were done in 10 minutes of shooting. The final editing involved some digital color crossing, but I also used a skilled retoucher: enter Janko Williams, who made everything look the way it was meant to be. The props came from PJ Hummel marvel warehouse in Tacoma.

On to new things!

Apples with apples

"Interesting Advertising" is the topic of this image and I have been a big fan of the iPad to show my work to clients. It is a big game changer in a small package. The image tried to translate that into a surreal setting (a downtown P-patch with the models wearing vintage dresses).

A quick run to the grocery store provided several pounds of apples...
Rachel and Lucianne were the models! Ari was my assistant. Jewelry from Rent the Runway.

Retouching: Janko Williams

Lady of the Lake: Using the Parabolic Light Modifier

I shot this image last Summer, the black dress was especially made by fashion designer Isaiah Whitmore (you can see some of his work on Ink Magazine). I wanted to continue with the same
cinematic look that I have been working with for some time, but apply it to a different setting, where the focus is the dress rather then the characters. Oh..some call it fashion..but whatever. This time the nod is to Arthurian legends of old, Vivianne of the lake was strong, beautiful..and a bit dark. So there you go. Tiffany Parente did the styling, MUA and hair..and stepped in to be a wonderful model for the shoot. Danny and Ari were great assistants! Oh the light scheme... just fill from the 7' Alien Bees silver reflector with the diffuser on. The AB1600 was probably firing at full power as it was a bright sunny day. f7.1, 1/125, ISO100.

The Horse. On Camera Flash.

I was day hiking on the Appennini mountains last September, when I met this small horse who was quietly grazing on the ridge I was walking on. The early morning light was beautiful and still low on the horizon, and I decided to take an image. I had my trusty canon G10, but that was it...how to get something better than just a happy snap? Think Fabio, think. Not that the horse was in any hurry but... I decided to go for a simple crosslight scheme with the sun, similar to what a lot of sport magazines do for their covers. The photographer often uses an on camera ring flash and one or two rim lights from behind the subject, depending on where the sun is. It gives that 3D feel to the image.

So I had the Sun behind the horse to camera right, underexposed until I got the sky and the landscape right (ISO 80, f4.0, 1/500th/sec) and bumped up the on camera flash (which I almost never use) until I got a good fill. I did not have an extra light to the left but I noticed that from one angle some direct sunlight hit the back of the horse..on my side. Bingo!

Not quite rim light, but it frames the horse's body quite well and it makes the image work.

Try covering it with your thumb and see how the image loses impact?

I did the color post processing at home, plus some trickery with contrast.

Sometimes you need to work with what you got.