A Silhouette 2.0

US Park Ranger in the afternoon light near the Mexican Border

Lets' get dirty - Some grungy tips.

The idea is nothing new, making new look old and clean look dirty. Here is one way to achieve that goal:

Stuff to create your grunge:

The image on the left is a shot I took of an old train bridge, and the image on the right is something I found. Anything with good texture will work, especially scratched or rusty-flaky stuff....

After you find your starter image, you have to do some cutting. I prefer the pen tool for cutting out just about anything. Except trees... good lord, I despise manually selecting trees, or just about any foliage for that matter. Anyways, after your subject removal, place your grunge layer behind it, and start playing with blend modes. The grunge on the third image is placed between the subject (Aaron) and the background, and the blend mode is set to "High Pass."

Now it is time for some extra awesomeness. Adding shapes above the the grunge layer and messing with blend modes can have nice results. I also added a layer mask on Aaron, and faded the grunge layer onto his lower half, mixing it in a little. Then.... some text.

Some outer glow for the text to help separate it from the background, then add more grunge, and stir. Add some extra warmth to the subject via Hue Saturation layer, and a little extra color came from adding the train bridge image above the grunge layer, and setting the blend mode to overlay... I think.

In photoshop, there are no rules. If you have the passion to create, that is all you need regardless of your skill level. I hope this helps someone create something dirty.

Those Circular-Pano Things....

It's just one of those things. I suppose at some point in time someone has come up with a name for it other than "circular-pano thing," but I don't know. I can't remember exactly when the first time I saw someone use this process, but I think it might have been my buddy Dave.

This is the original image of the U of A Mall. Yea, I agree, the other one is way more interesting.

This one goes to eleven... well actually from eleven to sixteen.

 

(the 11-16mm on my dirty D200)

I finally got a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8. And by "got" I mean that a friend of mine bought it, and now it's in my possession and I will be shelling out monthly payments to The Bank of Rick. Whatever. It doesn't matter. The important thing is that I have the width to get it done, if and only if it is width that is required. Well....

Wide angle lenses, like any other piece of photographers equipment has a time and a place, but I cannot say for sure that the next few months of my work will not be lacking in the millimeter department as I take every possible opportunity to use my new toy.

Reflections

Aaron Dennett stands on the bank of Silver Creek.

 By wikipedia and the law of reflection, the direction of incoming light and the direction of outgoing light reflected make the same angle with respect to the surface normal. You know this every time you look in the mirror. I like reflections, and the slightly distorted truth that can be found in them.

A Silhouette

f/6.3 1/160 ISO100, 185mm

While up in the pass working I noticed the end of day potential as the clouds stacked on the saturating horizon. I probably curse the weather more than I praise it, but sometimes mother nature throws you a bone.

Soldier Will

It was some time in the afternoon when my phone rang, Will just wanted to know if there was anything else I could think of that he should bring for the shoot. I could not. He drove to Arizona from California and today we began. We have weapons to model for a few magazines and a should get some real work done next week. This evening was just for fun, and his beard is totally rocking.

Unhappy Hands

Sepia Skies

f/6 1/160 ISO200, Arivaca Lake

There are a lot of things that I don't own photography wise, but one thing I need to get is a graduated Neutral Density filter. For a half dark piece of glass its a little expensive, and that is probably why I have been reluctant to buy one. I also don't shoot a lot of landscape stuff, but for when I get the itch or happen upon a ideal situation for photographic glory I know it would come in handy.

I had to heavily lighten the foreground in this image, while darkening the sky to get the clouds to look right. A graduated ND would have allowed me to properly expose both in one shot. I guess it is just one more thing to add to the wish list. How many days till Christmas?

By the way, this is not my canoe.

Those "Culinary" type people again....

I was ready, prepared, packed and stoked. The cameras and lenses were loaded in the pelican road case, the batteries were charged and the cards empty and waiting patiently for show time. The strobes were zipped tightly into the large black military-style duffel bag along with stands and umbrellas and weights and cables. But I hadn't heard from the client in a few days, so I thought it would be a good idea to give a call and confirm the 1PM shoot.

"Hello?"
"Hi, it's Alex, the photographer, I am just calling to confirm the shoot today."
"Oh, umm.... Didn't [omitted] call you?"
"No."
"Yea, we haven't designed the plates yet, so we will have to do it at a later date, sorry."
"Ok." Click

Okay, well, I guess I will just go get some food, then. I made my way over to Jax Kitchen, where owner Brian Metzger offered to buy me lunch in exchange for some images from the recent Tucson Culinary Festival. After downing a delightful steak sandwich and aioli covered fries and still itching for some hot photograph action, I mentioned to Brian that I had my camera in the car if he wanted to take some shots of himself and the winning margarita from the recent Margarita Competition. Needless to say he was all over the idea. Also needless to say, we ended up shooting a few more things than just a glass of tasty margarita.

Brian's 2008 & 2009 competition trophies, and the 2009 winning margarita. Tasty.

Brian Himself, in all his margarita-competition-winning glory.

With that out of the way, Brian had some more ideas of things he just had to have shot that day, and I was more than happy to indulge his every whim.

 

A delicious strawberry-something cake. Guess who got to eat the missing piece.... :)

Brian's beautiful pastry chef and her creation, wearing the perfect color almost like she knew...

You can see the red cake particles I just noticed I forgot to photoshop out of the icing... oops.

The head chef of Jax Kitchen, who, if rumors are true, will be competing for Iron Chef?

An alternate horizontal cropping. I think I like this better than the vertical, but his smile in the vertical makes it a winner.

The dining room of the restaurant was pretty photography-friendly, with the warm-white paint, nice dark hard-wood floors, and super clean tables and settings. When I was poking around for a place to photograph the chef, I noticed that there were curtains that could be pulled across the front windows to keep the harsh setting sun from the diners eyes. I knew immediately that I wanted to shoot him in from of them, as they had a great wave that would lead to a nice soft, but interesting backdrop.

I set up my SB-800 flash with a 10° grid and pointed it toward the curtains from behind and to the left. For those who don't know, a grid is a device that attaches to the front of a light to focus the beam into a spotlight. In this case, the beam of light is 10° wide.

The key light is a strobe with an umbrella positioned about 2 feet to the right of him, and about a foot higher than his head, giving a nice soft light. I just love the way the curtains came through, and I am glad I noticed them. You can see just to the right of his head, the curved line where the sun was pushing through the fabric, and I think its perfect how it leads your eye right to him.

If anyone would like me to go into any more detail about how any of these shots were lit, please leave a comment or send me an email at landeenphoto (at) gmail.com.

Tactical Weapons USCBP Cover

The fine folks over at Harris Publications decided to put some of my work on the cover once again. This shot was taken as a set showcasing the hard working men and women of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Air Unit. That fine piece of equipment the Air Interdiction Agent is holding is M14 modified to be attached in the door gunner's window of the Black Hawk helicopter. Get Some.

Thug Life and coffe beans

 The owners of Café Lucé, Tucson AZ.

This photo was taken as a lighting test shot for an advertising brochure. There is a strobe with a silver reflector umbrella to camera left, probably 15ft from the woman, and another strobe belt-high to the right hiding underneath a table about 5 feet from the guy. If anything, I would say that the lower right strobe was a little hot, causing the man's arm to blow-out a little.

Remember, that the farther a light source is placed from the subjects, the more even the lighting will appear if the subjects are different distances from said source. In a situation like this where space is a consideration (inside a small coffee shop) just make sure that the highlights on the subject closest to the light source are not blown out: meaning that they are completely over-exposed and there is no data in the pixels there, i.e. pure white. It is much easier to lighten something that is a little underexposed than battle with blown-out highlights.

Sometimes you just have to get high.

If you are taking a photo of something that people see often, it is an easy way to make it more interesting by changing your angle. Get down on the ground and shoot up, or like in this case go "cliffhanger" and scale a K-2 size rock-face and shoot down on the subject.

Also, get creative with the cropping. I was lucky that the clear skies and glass-flat water gave this fantastic gradient and I used that "nothing" space to add to the feel of the image, framing the subject in the corner and waiting for him to make a cast where I wanted it to be.

It helps when the subject is a friend of yours as well. "Hey Aaron, move to your right 10 feet, will ya?"

Thank you for smoking.

I squinted at the viewfinder as Josh released his pose and looked at me. "What do you think?"
It was 8pm and we were standing in my driveway in central Tucson shooting photos for his band's website. "I think we need a smoke machine," I said.

Which we did have, but it was on the other side of town buried under 1000 feet of band room junk in a closet that people didn't open for a reason. It was most likely out of fluid anyways.

We had been doing this for a few hours now, and I was about ready to call it for the night. But as I was starting to unplug my lights, I looked up and watched as the bands two guitarists, standing stage right, simultaneously produce cigarettes and put them to flame. I smiled. "Hey fellas, can you come over here for a sec, please?"

Welcome to the Landeen Photography Blog

"Going for Gas" 1/640sec, f/3.5, ISO100, Nikon D200

June 30, 2007 6:07pm, Madrid, New Mexico

Dan leaned over the steering wheel looking for the turn. "It's pronounced 'Mad-drid,'" he said while squinting through the dusty windshield into the afternoon sun. "Not like the one in Spain."

It is an interesting town. A pile of art galleries squashed around a wandering stretch of  State Highway 14, houses and single-wides sprinkle the surrounding hills along a bumpy spiderweb of dirt roads that seem go everywhere and nowhere. Dan lived here once. Dan has lived a lot of places once.

A few minutes earlier we had been warming stools at the Mine Shaft Tavern washing the road dust from our throats, when Dan tilted the his bottle back and poured the last bit of dark liquid into his mouth. "C'mon, I got someplace to show you." He set his empty bottle down hard on the bar-top like an exclamation point, wiped his mouth, and stood up. I followed him through the rifle-handled double doors and down the worn steps to the truck.

The Tundra slowed as we took a right off the pavement. Pale powdery dust swirled around the tires as we made our way up the hill into the shadows. "It's right up here on the top of the hill," he said with a nod and a little smile. A minute later we crested and Dan stopped the truck and shut it off. "Welcome to the Madrid Cemetery."A sneeze of wind pushed the dust cloud away from the truck and into the bushes as I grabbed my camera out of the case and opened the door.

Going for Gas

The area surrounding Larry's final resting place was like nothing I had ever seen before at a grave site. The steel gas can stood atop a pile of rocks facing the setting sun. Small rusty metal shavings poked and curled around the holes left by the creator's drill bit like teeth in tiny hungry mouths. Surrounding the can there was a well used but comfortable looking couch, a Webber-style grill, a two foot tall metal rooster, a Buddha statue, a hearty pile of empty twelve-ounce and forty-ounce beer bottles, a half full oil can, and many other various trinkets and doodads, knickknacks and gadgets that one might find populating the dusty shelves, nooks and crannies of Anywhere, USA.

From a distance it looked like a trash pile, but upon closer inspection it looked - for lack of a better word -  organized. People had been here, and would come again. People drinking and cooking tasty meats, hanging out on the couch, laughing, carrying on and kicking back. People partying with Larry.

I didn't know this man, and he didn't know me but as I stood in this place with the playful wind and soft orange end-of-day light I felt closer to something I couldn't quite touch.Who was Larry Titus? Who are his grilling, drinking, party friends? Has he finally found some gas?

I will probably never know, so I took a photo instead.