Photo 365 Project

I’m a photographer.  So to address the vision that just conjured up in your brain…  Yes, that means when my days aren’t spent traveling around in First Class drinking champagne, my hours are are taken up photographing supermodels in couture clothes who eat cotton balls for dinner.

Or something.

I think it’s funny people sometimes think this job is super glam.  No really, it IS awesome…but it’s not exactly GLAM.  So today, I’m here to show you a behind the scenes moment of me photographing (for real, this was an assignment!) a McDonald’s Happy Meal toy.  No joke.

I wouldn’t trade up my job for anything.  I love LOVE it.  But as I was arranging the figurine in a spot and wondering if I could do anything creative with the lighting….it hit me: this is too funny not to share! Anyway, I got the shot (this is straight out of camera and not edited to get rid of blemishes):

By the way, if you photograph products, this was an easy one light setup: I set up a strobe (remember, the best place for a flash is OFF the camera) to the right of the picture and bounced the light off of white foamcore.  There was white board behind the doll and I also set up white foamcore to the left side of the doll for fill in light.  My settings were F6.3, 1/200 with a 100 ISO.

I met this talented paper artist recently and she hired me to take photos of the dozens of works she’s made over the years.  Awesome! I love pairing up with passionate and compelling people.  Problem is, they’re all framed, many are very large, and they have price tags on them! So the work began…here’s how to shoot things with very reflective surfaces (i.e. things in glass frames.)  Take black sheets and cover all sides of the item, INCLUDING the front of it.  You cut a hole in the sheet and shoot the lens through it (yes this most likely means you will get under the sheet to take photos, if the items are large) It helps if you get in some shade and use natural light…strobes are just tricky.  For photographs, I also used “lens distortion” in photoshop to correct some of the lines from the picture frames, which didn’t quite match up.  Then I photoshopped out the price tag.  Here are some of my favorites.  She’s putting together a website and I will DEFINITELY pass along when it’s up and running!

♥ One of my California friends is a tremendous writer.  Thought I’d pass this along.  This snippet is his response to the state legislature there being completely broke, but continuing to spend like money grows on trees: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/02/EDGP1E7BN0.DTL