I have a new fancy website

Take a look at:

www.fabiogovernato.com

There are a lot of new (and old) pictures that I have never shown on line.

And just for you, my dear blog reader, here is a link to the 'product gallery' that is not otherwise visible from the main page.

Shooting for Baby & Co: Beauty Dish and Strip Light

I was given the opportunity to shoot for Baby & Co, a fashion store in Seattle that specializes in French couture from small, independent designers. The client wanted to highlight her Spring collection, themed as "Tea in the Moroccan desert". The store set up for the campaign is pretty neat and you should visit it if you happen to be in downtown Seattle.

I had a full team: three models, MUA+hair stylist and a fashion stylist. We had better get something good! Shooting in early March was the challenge....desert? Umm. And when the weather is not your friend a plan B is necessary. We set our outdoor shoot on a roof, the silver paint turns it into a giant softbox and gives a luminous, geometric setting. My studio is downstairs so if the weather wasn't cooperating a quick strategic retreat was possible.

And in fact our outdoor session was limited to ...20 minutes, abruptly stopped by a light snowfall. I still managed to get one good shot (taken with a Canon speedlite firing at full power+diffuser).

Once back in the studio the challenge was to give a "desert feel" to the images.
The light scheme is similar to what I had used a few weeks ago: a beauty dish high on camera left (heavily masked with aluminum foil to avoid spill onto the background). However, to add a feeling of strong sunlight, perhaps seen from a darker interior, I added a gridded, full body strip light behind the models on camera right. It separates body and hair from the background and, if aimed right, provides definition to the model face.

The post production is where the mood of the campaign is set: The pallet was designed to give a sense of ancient, dusty and mysterious, and so I used warm, but heavily desaturated colors. To each image I added a distressed background pattern, set as an 'overlay' layer with a 20% opacity, which I mostly erased in front of the models. It adds to the feeling of ancient times and somehow reminded me of some of the setting in the good old Indiana Jones movies. It's a technique that should not be overdone and that I have seen used a lot in fine art but I think works well in this setting.

You can see the full set, including the outdoor image here

The best camera is the one you have with you. Part 3: more iPhone Polaroids

This is the final set! From From left to right: a 'Polaroid' test shot for a Chanel bag, two doves (and a beehive just off camera) on the Milwaukee - Pacific railroad , breakfast at the Kingfish Cafe', and some rocky cliffs close to Ancient Lakes, WA. All images where edited with 'Camera Bag' and Lightroom.

The best camera is the one you have with you 2

This time I picked a few 'iPhone Polaroids' that show a few places I like. From top left and clockwise: My roof on a Winter morning, a sandstorm nearby Odessa, WA, an old German cemetery in Eastern WA and some window reflections over a Capitol Hill building on a lazy Summer evening.

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.