Updated Photo website.

Check it out at www.fabiogovernato.com

It's a bird! It's chocolate? ... It's books!

My art director (Hi Chelsey!) likes to pick up the camera and needed a cool image of books for a conceptual poster (I think this is how designers 'd call it). So we fussed together with the lighting scheme for a bit, which turned out to be two large softboxes on top of the books and with a little space in between to place the camera, looking down on the table. There you go. Artsy. Shot with a Canon G10, which I really like for those quick.and.dirty.yet.professional jobs.

Check Chelsey Scheffe awesome work here.

Hard Punk Rock Light. Black Patent Shoes.

These shoes actually smell of gasoline. The art director drawing (hey Tiffany!) had the shoes on a pile of ice so we went to the local grocery store and got a several bags of ice (2 chunks 1 solid block). Here is where my old ice axes came out useful....
I set all the ice in a big transparent plastic box with a lot of empty tupperware for fill. I put the shoes on top and off we went. The background was shot separately with a red #42 Rosco filter. I used the ring flash (a Coco modifier) in several positions to highlight different spots (the heels, the reflection on the lower edge of the shoe at the front) and put them together in post. Shot at f16, ISO 100. 1/200th with a Canon t1i. A nod to the Clash and David Clugston, who shoots with a somewhat similar style. Thanks for the inspiration!

Anthropologie Time.

I love the style of the Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters catalogs.
It's graceful, simple and well, dreamy. It mixes vintage settings and tones with modern living situations. It's a look that many retail stores like and customers can relate to.
I also affectionately call it "shooting like a girl" with some envy for photographers who have mastered it (darn you Chloe Scheffe!) . The photos above are the result of me having a stab at it. The first set was shot in an old apartment in Chicago (hey Angela!). I used only window light, a large white sheet as a reflector to camera left, about 5 feet from the model and a camera almost literally grabbed from a friend who happened to be there. The second set up was almost equally minimalistic: the model (hey Tiffany!) got hair and make up done in my studio and we walked out to a small city garden in Seattle. I used a simple ring flash modifier attached to my hotshoe flash (see this post) and exposed the flash at about half a stop below ambient. Then I used Lightroom to add the "Holga/Vintage/Polaroid/Artsy" look to it.

Both sets featured several Anthropology clothes and accessories (and my dad's thirty year old scarf). What's not to like? This images would form the core of a relatively low budget ad campaign perfect for a fashion store or an up and coming apparel designer. I like.

New Web Site!

I have a new spiffy web site!:

www.fabiogovernato.com

Commercial Photography and Video with a Canon DSLR

Kashless.org asked me to create a commercial for their first ad campaign. It was a very interesting project that involved shooting simple images of objects to be posted on their site (see last post), print them, shoot a video and add a voiceover and soundtrack (make sure your sound is on!). A lot of people got involved and we had a decent budget to do a good job.





The fun part came from using a DSLR camera to shoot both images and video. I used an old Sony to get the "casual" Polaroid look to the images and the used the new Canon Rebel (500D or T1i in the US) to shoot a short video at 30fps. We used natural light and cut the video using Final Cut Express. A couple of trick I learned: remember to lock the exposure and use a fixed white balance (not AWB!) to keep the movie as homogeneous as possible.

That Polaroid Look

So the client asked for a set of images to use in a video. The images had to have the distinctive "Polaroid look" to evoke a mood that is casual but elegant, artsy but spontaneous, practical but environmentally conscious. "Umm, well OK" I said. How does this translate in photographic terms? Polaroid images are famous for being blurry, having blown highlights, strong vignetting and a somewhat shallow depth of field. Yellowish high tones, blueish shadows and low color saturation are also part of that look.

Rather than grabbing a Polaroid camera and some old film
I decided to shoot with an (old) digital camera. I will have more control on the results the images won't need to be scanned and I will be able to make higher resolution prints. Using a point and shoot instead of my trusted DSLR will make the images look a little more casual. Like, a dude who got a lucky shot. But how do I change the color scheme and tones to get the desired "Polaroid" look. Enters Lightroom and its famous presets. The LR community has developed a number of them that are freely available and easy to install. So I got a few, tweaked them to my liking (usually reducing contrast, adding more vignetting and changing the color balance. And here are some of the results. Not bad.