Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Francesco at Old Mint

Now that my finals are over, I have time to update my blog (´･ω･｀)

For our class photo shoot, we went to the Old Mint building downtown. I shot this last February and since it was the beginning of the semester, we started out with simple lighting by using only 1 light with 1 modifier. In this case, we used a strobe with a 10° grid and used it in a way to create dramatic lighting.  We aimed to create “Rembrandt lighting” like Rembrandt paintings where the angle of the light causes the shadow of the nose to reach the corner of the mouth, creating an upside down triangle of light under one eye. Because of the dramatic lighting, it actually reminds me of film noir.

I had the most fun with the set up shots. Francesco was playful in them and it’s always fun to wrap up each shot with a set up shot by having fun with it.

We used black wrap in some of the shots to block off the light hitting Francesco’s shirt since it was white and too bright when the light hit it; it was taking away the attention from his face.

 

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Friday, May 17, 2013

Too Busy

I completely forgot about these photos that I took a year ago for an assignment during my first semester of art school. The assignment was to show what you do for a day in your life. I decided to shoot floating self portraits at the places I usually went to like the Safeway, dorm laundry room, Chestnut st. and a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant right outside my previous dorm. This makes me miss living in the Marina though I definitely don’t miss the dorms.

Basically, the concept was that I was too busy running errands that my feet never touch the ground because I’m constantly rushing from one thing to another.

In terms of how I shot this, I asked my roommate to stand in the area where visualized myself standing then set up my tripod, composed and adjusted the camera settings, switched it over to manual focus and traded places with my roommate. I set the shutter drive to continuous high speed shutter and told my roommate to press and hold the shutter as I was jumping to get the right “floating” shot where the clothes weren’t moving all around as I was in mid air. I also put my hair in a bun so it wouldn’t go crazy and move around too.

The chair shot was the hardest to shoot. I had to make sure my thighs were parallel to the ground and my butt had to land on the chair. My butt did not feel good after shooting. I was constantly landing on my butt. THAT CHAIR WASN’T EVEN SOFT.

Posted in Conceptual, People, Self Tags: , , , , ,

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Monday, May 13, 2013

Project Pointe

Over the past semester, I’ve started to really enjoy shooting photos in black and white after learning creative control over controlling the black and white tones on-camera instead of having to do it through Photoshop. Throughout the pre-production process, I wanted to keep the photos as simple as possible while showing the environment the dancers’ in. My original idea was to shoot a dance-based fashion editorial in color using an elemental theme to bind all the photos together. I ended up not going that route and shot something fine art instead. I actually haven’t shot anything “fine art” for about a year. I’ve been shooting portraits most of the time so it’s great to create work like this again.

I arranged 3 photo shoots with 3 amazing ballet dancers and shot at different locations in San Francisco. I didn’t have any permits to shoot at any of the locations so I was worried about getting kicked out of the area or worse, getting fined or even worse, getting asked to delete my photos. Luckily, no one asked us to leave. A couple of people just stopped by and watched.

Here are a few set up shots below. I lit all photos with a soft box and a couple of photos with a soft box + speedlite and reflector.

 

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Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Ruby Skye

For my location lighting class, my class got a permit to shoot at Ruby Skye, a club in downtown San Francisco. I was originally supposed to shoot another model however, en route to a jewelry pickup, the model’s boyfriend got caught in a car accident and so the model couldn’t shoot with us anymore. Good thing one of our classmate’s offered a friend of her’s to model for us so we ended up shooting her. We were under a time crunch because our new model had to leave soon for lunch.

I really love the light on the model’s face, it’s just that her hand is gigantic in comparison to her head. My instructor called it “monster hand.” (´∩｀。) He suggested cropping the hand out but I like the wide shot. But for my portfolio, I’ll get that fixed. Aside from that, I like how I was able to balance the ambient red light with the strobe and speedlite. I dropped my shutter speed down to 1/8 second since the couch area was very dim. I had to bring out my flashlight to set up equipment. I also like how her lips stand out!

One of the things I did in editing was retouched and smoothened the skin, blurred the wrinkles on her shirt, brought down the highlight on her forehead, added color tones and cropped in on the right just a little bit because the distortion was making her thighs look bigger. You can see the original photo below.

And the set up shot! I always like seeing and showing behind-the-scenes shots.

We used a Profoto 7B pack which was too powerful even on the lowest settings since we were almost shooting in the darkness. The softbox was also too big so we flagged down half of it so it wouldn’t spread too much. I shot my photo much closer in, not including the wall, or else that would’ve been too distracting if I included it in.

Throughout the shoot, the crew of Ruby Skye were starting to prepare for that night’s event and one of them brought their small poodle who kept running around. The poodle was so cute! I told my friend, before we leave, I’m going to kidnap the dog while the owner was busy working. It would’ve been great if I did. I also wish I had a clearer picture of the dog but he kept moving so much.

 

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Saturday, April 27, 2013

One Reminder, An Empty Room (Stop Motion)

I created a quick stop motion based on this one day during finals week last fall. I came back home, wanting to focus on finals when in the end, I got a major headache, ended up crying myself to sleep and staying in bed all day. I was mulling over what had happened in the past few days, which was an unexpected happy experience that had to stop. To be less vague, an old friend visited the city for a few days who I ended up developing feelings for.

Though I wish it was true, Danbo, the Amazon box figurine, is a metaphor for my neighbor’s cat, Bobo. I live with myself at a studio apartment and occasionally, Bobo would scratch the outside of my door and I’d always let her in. On that day, she came when I wanted her to. No, she didn’t make me tea though her presence was like waking up to tea because I LOVE TEA.

I wanted to keep a clean look throughout the film so in the process, my apartment became a lot less cluttered which I’m so happy about! I created more breathing space when I didn’t know there could be more. Wanting to enhance the simplicity and the pastel color palette, I batch-processed all 1161 frames in Photoshop; slightly increasing exposure, adding fade, saturation and contrast for a hint of whimsical and dreaminess. When I first moved to this apartment, I wanted to film a stop motion, using the same emotion and song and I hadn’t gotten to it. A year later, now it’s done!

Here is a photo of Bobo on that day. She was a great companion for the day, just a little bit distracting. And this is also the story board I created.

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