Myerson Photo Blog

Though the weather in Tucson is now turning pretty nice (today was 84 and sunny), it was only a few weeks ago that we had snow on our mountains and sub-freezing temperatures here in the valley.

At the risk of becoming a Strobist metablog, I’m going to post one more blog post here about Strobist. I had every intention of playing along with the Lighting 101 segments when David ran those. They seemed like (and were. And still are, I suppose) a great way to practice lighting techniques and force myself to shoot assignments not for clients or stock.

So this time around - Lighting 102 - I really am going to play along at home. I’ve already missed the first several assignments, but it’s not too late to jump onboard. The current assignment, due in early March, is a single light setup. The whole point of the assignment, however, is to press that one light into extra service. Through creative use of reflectors (traditional reflectors, as well as anything else that might bounce and modify the light), one light can serve as key light, fill light, rim light, and who knows what else.

To help us along the way, the lesson is set up to mimic a commercial assignment. That is, there’s a topic and a publication. Of course, we’re free to select the topic from a list of three general options (”Financial Planning”, “Going Green”, “Physical Fitness”), and we’re free as well to select the publication. Thinking of the shoot in terms of an end use can help clarify the context and point you in the right direction for previsualization. Shooting a treadmill for Wired might entail a different set up than shooting the same subject for Men’s Health or Vanity Fair or Guns and Ammo.

In the interest of “double duty”, I may try to develop a shot concept that would serve as my entry for the Tucson Photo Meetup monthly challenge for March as well. The theme there is “macro/closeup”. There are lots of ways the two assignments could be suitably combined.

I’ll post my results here on my blog, as well as in the Strobist Flickr group.

So you want your logo to appear spray painted on an urban background without the hassle of all that property destruction, huh? Here’s a simple way to get that freshly-tagged look and still stay out of lockup for the night.

First off, lets assemble some pieces. We’ll need a background image, our logo, and some assorted graffiti art. For the background image, I’ll be using this corrugated metal wall, available from iStockphoto:

The logo we’ll be using is this little number, a little vector art I created just for this occasion. You can use a vector illustration or raster art (provided it’s already big enough for your final output). I find that simpler, monochrome images work best, but you should experiment.

Lastly, I purchased a vector file from iStock as well to serve as additional image elements. Using a vector file is cool, because the art is extremely extensible - you can resize it infinitely without any kind of degradation, you can change colors, really do whatever you need, and it never loses quality. The vector I purchased was this one. Here are some of the pieces I extracted from that file (watermarked because this file is not freely available. Please purchase a copy for your own use).

Alright, let’s start. Open your background file, and paste in your logo. Rename that layer to “logo”. For the purposes of this tutorial, let’s assume that your pasted logo is a single color, as is the case with the house logo. Assuming that it is, the first thing you’ll want to do is open the “Blending Options” palette for that layer. In the section labeled “Blend if…”, move the black slider for “This Layer” over a few notches. That’ll turn off everything on the logo layer that is black; in other words, all visible pixels on that layer will become invisible.

Invisible logos are not that exciting, so lets give it some style. I gave the layer a layer style of “Gradient Overlay”. I picked a nice red gradient. If you want the actual colors in my gradient, they were [178,1,1] on the left side, [210,71,64] at about the midpoint, and [210,64,64] at the right end. You could use a solid color overlay as well, but I like the subtle variation that a gradient gives. After you’ve defined your gradient, set the style’s blend mode to “Multiply”.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

This is a good start, but we’re not done yet. Next, I duplicated the logo layer, and set the new layer’s gradient style blend mode to overlay instead of multiply. I brought back that layer’s opacity to about 50%. Next I put the two logo layers into their own folder set, and set that folder’s opacity to 75%.

If we were to stop here, we’d suffer from one of the biggest problems I often see in raster-vector composite work. Namely, that the vector elements look a whole lot like they were composited in to the image. The factor that is most responsible for this is the fact that the vector elements still have those perfectly crisp edges. I don’t care how skilled a stenciler you might have had tagging your logo onto innocent surfaces, there’s no way it’s coming out that clean. So we need to rough it up a little.

Step one is to use a layer mask. I started scratching up the hard edges using some grunge brushes. You could also do it with clever application of some native Photoshop filters, but I’ll save that for a future tutorial. You’ll want to be careful at this stage. Some logos will hold up to this kind of distressing better than others. Besides that, some clients may have very specific requirements as to what can and cannot be done with their logos. I’ve done work for clients who wouldn’t even allow the 3-degree rotation I applied to our little house icon.

The next stage of roughing it up is to use those vector spray paint splotches we licensed. Again, bring them into Photoshop as black pixels. Be sure to put the splotch layer into the same folder as the logo; that will ensure that the layer mask we created before applies to the paint splotches as well.

We’ll once again hide the black pixels and replace them with a gradient fill as we did for the logo. The way to do that, this time, is to right click on the logo layer (the first one, not the copy), and select “Copy Layer Style”. Then right click on the paint splotch layer and select “Paste Layer Style”. The specifics of where to put the splotches and how opaque to make this layer will depend greatly on your file. It’s easy to go overboard with paint splotches, so experiment and see what works best for you.

That’s all there is to it! Urban flair without any incriminating paint on your fingertips!

Hey Tucson photography friends! Good news, not to be missed. David Hobby (yes, this David Hobby) will be in Phoenix in March for one of his fantastic Strobist seminars.

Details about the seminar can be found here. In keeping with the Strobist’s philosophy of doing more with less, the seminar is very reasonably priced. David says he will have some equipment available for attendees to check out, “petting-zoo” style. The seminar is going to cover some theory, some practice, some ideas, and some fun. In David’s own words:

With these seminars, my goal is threefold: To refine your approach to creating light, to fill you with as many ideas as possible in a day’s time and to have fun doing it. We’ll start with a roadmap for the day, which I will do my best to keep us on. But each session will take on somewhat of a life of its own. Which is a good thing.

David will run two sessions - one on Saturday and an identical seminar on Sunday. I’m registered for the Saturday session. Let me know in email or my blog comments if you’ll be headed up either of those days.

A few downtown Tucson textures from my recent hunt:

Once again, these textures were found in the Stone and Franklin area of Downtown Tucson, in the few minutes I had to kill before the most recent Tucson Photo Meetup. As luck would have it, I was in that area just as two trains were passing. I snapped a couple of shots of the passing Union Pacific locomotives, but nothing really astounding came of it. Still, it was cool to be there just in time to see that.

Not golf photography, but how I try to apply the only lesson I’ve ever learned in golf to photography.

Years ago, my wife and I took golf lessons. She was born a good golfer, and consequently got a lot out of the lessons. I’m a lousy golfer, and managed to learn one single tip in the whole six-week course. The instructor saw how every one of my drives would slice pretty sharply to the right. His advice? “Hook it.” That is, he wanted me to intentionally try to get the ball to hook left. I already knew what it felt like to go too far right. By learning what it felt like to go too far left, could eventually learn how to hit it right down the middle.

So I try to bring that to my photography. Whatever I’m doing wrong, I try to overcompensate the other direction. That lets me find out what I need to do to get it right and drive it right down the middle.

A good example is in my lighting. During a recent shoot, I knew I wanted a dramatic rim lighting on the subject. I set up the lights to do what I wanted, snapped off a few test shots, and was just not pleased with the result. It was close, but just not there. I tweaked the lights back and forth, in and out, started playing with a number of variables. It started to get frustrating, and I hate doing too much experimentation with a model on set.

So rather than tweak it incrementally, I went whole hog and moved the lights completely incorrectly. Rather than giving me harsh rim light, the setup created an overall flat light. There was no modeling, no dimensionality to it. It was awful. But it also showed me what I was missing before; the lights as I’d set them up before were too harsh. I wanted rim lighting, but it wasn’t until I washed everything out with boring flat lighting did I realize that I wasn’t really looking for overly dramatic rim lighting, but a nice accent rim light. Sometimes you have to go all the way to the right to see how far left you’d been going before.

These days I’m applying the same lesson to my Photoshop post-process work. For a long time, I held back on doing any post-processing at all. Now that I’m putting a little more thought into the final piece, I want to know that I’m hitting my target. So I’ll do some experimentation and take the intended filtering (sharpening, for instance, desaturation, or others) way too far. It lets me see where my own aesthetic limits are.

The biggest business news in Tucson of late is that Oro Valley-based biotech firm Ventana Medical Systems, Inc., has agreed to a tender offer from Swiss giant Roche. The result of this $3.4 billion buyout is that Ventana will become a part of the large Roche family of companies.

Recently, the CEO of Roche, as well as the CEO of the various business units that will house the new acquisition, were in town for a “town hall” meeting on the campus of Ventana Medical Systems. I was asked to shoot some images from this event for use in promotional materials, websites, and newsletters for the two organizations.

I shot the event with a Canon 5D, and a light set up that consisted of an umbrellad strobe (Alien Bees AB800)  and a Canon 480EX speedlight. The speedlight was synched via Pocket Wizards, and the strobe fired via optical slave. I had the speedlight mounted on a camera tripod, which made repositioning a snap. I had it aimed at the podium to serve as a rim light or backlight (depending on my vantage point), or I could pivot the tripod head to bounce the speedlight off the nearby wall to provide a larger, softer fill.

My goal in the light set up was to provide maximum flexibility with a minimum of effort. At first, I doubted my decision to go with a speedlight and a strobe, thinking that two speedlights, synched via PW and mounted on tripods, would be more flexible. That may be true, but in the end I think the set up I chose worked better - I had great coverage from the fixed strobe, and its recycle time and “always on” capabilities were huge factors. The strobe was high up on a lightstand basically in the center of the audience, and I wouldn’t have been able to adjust it or reset it if needed. A two-speedlight set up would have been more flexible, but at the cost of more time spent managing the lights. When shooting without an assistant, anything that can relieve me of a job is a welcome addition.