Saturday, December 31, 2011

Shooting from the Roof Tops

I met Laszlo while casting models for one of the
Canon Live learning events (fantastic way to get valuable hands on experience). I booked him first as a model and then a second time as an actor :) but I never got to actually work with him as a photographer so we scheduled a photo-shoot just for the two of us...

Due to the short notice of the "plan," I couldn't get a decent wardrobe stylist that catered to men and we decided to wing it and use some of Laszlo's clothes and a few things I had lying around...not a good idea in hindsight...

I shot everything on a white background and we had fun (?) trouble shooting my gear(nothing wanted to work right that day!) and playing music :)

When I came home (my card reader refused to work at the studio ?!?) and looked at the photos, I was a little bummed out- the "styling" was less then great (my fault, I'll spare you the embarrassing photos ) - luckily Laszlo had a very cool coat and vinyl pants and is nothing short of gorgeous!

I decided to spice things up by changing out the white background and adding textures in Photoshop.

This was the basic setup although I did move the lights around a few times to create different moods.



When I couldn't make up my mind which of the poses to use, I opted instead for a composite of three images:


I had a vision of Laszlo standing on a high roof top in NYC, so I searched stock photography websites and ended up buying this one (got it from BigStockPhoto.com ), it actually had a young boxer in it I had to retouch out:



Combining the two for the final composite:


Another idea I had was having him stand by a window, it took a while until I found a window I liked, but it was worth it, because I think it works really well with this image:



Here are some "as shot" vs. having fun with textures, (try Graphicauthority.com and onOne Photo Frame
onOne products for some great brushes and texture elements).
BTW, all the the Tattoos , are me playing with the "wrap" option in Photoshop :)





So it turned out that shooting "simple" got my creative juices flowing and pushed me to explore different directions of expressing my vision :) with that being said, I would have had an easier time extracting my model if I knew what background I was going to use in advance (I would have used a dark one for the city scape image).

Laszlo was a pleasure to work with! If you are interested in booking him, he can be contacted here:Portfolio

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