What kind of things do I like to shoot? Well, let’s start off by taking a look at some of my favorite images on Flickr:

One of the things several people have suggested you do when trying to define your style is to go through magazines and pull out your favorite images and see what they have in common. Find things that inspire you. So I did that with Flickr since there are tens of thousands of images to choose from. After going through my favorites I noticed several things in common with a majority of the images that stood out to me:

• portraits
• interesting locations/environments
• interesting lighting, both natural and artificial
• strong contrast, both in colors and from light to dark
• medium to high amounts of post-processing

Now, not every image meets all of the above criteria, but a majority of the images meet a majority of the things I listed above. So now I know what images I find compelling, I can break that down into a statement about the work that I want to shoot and show:

I’m a portrait photographer that shoots people juxtaposed to interesting locations and environments by utilizing light, both natural and artificial, to create contrasts in both light and color. I use post-processing to enhance these contrasts and to help realize my vision for the images I create.

It’s a work in progress, but you get the idea. That statement is a fairly accurate representation of the images that excite me and of the images I want to create. Hopefully you see this theme throughout many of the images that I have shot and shared with you on Flickr:

It’s not perfect representation of what I said I want to shoot, especially at the beginning of the set, but I feel that my more recent images are all starting to lean towards that central vision I want to adopt for my work. And yes, there is some studio work in there as well, which negates the interesting locations/environments portion of my vision statement, but shooting in the studio can really allow me to bring out my other talents, especially in the lighting and post-production departments.

Time and time again you here that you cannot market yourself until you know exactly what it is you want to shoot and be known for. If you don’t shoot and promote that work then you’ll be known for shooting that type of work, which will keep you from reaching your goals. I know I don’t want to shoot weddings, kids, maternity shots, etc. I want to shoot interesting shots of people, in interesting or relevant environments, that can be used to tell a story, or create a story or interest in a particular subject. Ultimately I’d like to shoot higher-end commercial and editorial type work, stuff like Joe McNally or Douglas Sonders shoots.

While we are on that subject I want to mention some photographers that I really admire. Photographer’s work who inspires me and makes me want to reach their level of ability and success. I already mentioned two:

• Joe McNally
• Douglas Sonders

But there are several others who’s work I really admire (in no particular order):

• Joey Lawrence
• Jeremy Cowart
• Dustin Snipes
• Zack Arias
• David Hobby

And that’s just scratching the surface. There are so many photographers out there that have amazing work that inspire me. But each one of them has photos that share part or all of my vision of what I want to shoot that attracts me to them. McNally’s use of light, color, and the environment. Sonder’s and Joey L’s use of light and post-processing. Hobby’s use of light and the environment. Each one of them shoots in a way that I strive to shoot and just by studying their work I’m learning more and more about what I like and don’t like. And, if I ever had the chance, I would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the ability to learn from them in person, to meet with them and pick their brains about the hows and whys of what they shoot. And, if I could ever be so lucky, I would drop just about anything I had going on for a chance to work with them, to be their assistant (or whatever they needed), whether it be for a day, month, year, or longer. They all inspire me and would love to be able to work with them.

What/who inspires you? What’s your vision for your photography? What do YOU want to shoot?

Sorry this one is so late, but I have a good excuse this time. Sunday was my grandpa’s funeral, so I was on a last-minute flight to Colorado on Friday and wrapped up in the sadness and togetherness of the family while I was there so taking my weekly picture was the last thing on my mind. I did snap this photo from my iPhone at the funeral though if it makes you feel any better: http://bestc.am/Ke5

He was a great grandpa and he will be missed. I’ve been telling everyone that “he’s the grandpa that every little kid growing up should have.”

I want to shoot something in the near future in his honor and get some prints made and send them to the family, but I’m not sure what exactly to shoot yet, but once I figure it out you will know about it.

Since everyone was sad all weekend we tried to keep some humor going as much as we could and one of the running jokes was how we are all feeling “dark and cold” (aka emo LOL) inside, so I decided to shoot a few shots tonight depicting that feeling, especially since I’m still feeling the sadness of grandpa being gone.

I used a simple one-light setup that I read about over at the Lighting Essentials blog – a single flash through a white umbrella off to one side to create the shadow and then a fill card on the other side to open the shadows up a little. I fired off a few shots before my roommate had to leave, which meant I had to move all of my stuff away from the garage door.

When starting the setup I had this dark, noir, black and white theme in mind, and every time I think about shoots like that I think smoke and cigarettes, so I wanted to try and incorporate that into my shot somehow, even though I don’t smoke.

Luckily there were some laying around from one of my friends, so I lit one and fired off like three shots before I couldn’t take it any more and put it out. I’ve been coughing ever since LOL. The smoke didn’t show up (because I was shooting against white, stupid me), but I liked the feel of the shot anyway. It definitely does the “dark and cold” feeling some justice.

Here is the setup shot:

I have another noir-themed shot coming up in the future, so hopefully I can play with the dark, moody light again soon!

That’s it for tonight – just didn’t want to get behind on my project. I should definitely be able to get out and shoot some this weekend since it’s warming up here a little (going from 8 F to 40 F feels like a heat wave at this point LOL).

Here is the first setup:

I wanted to try using a gridded flash for on-axis fill to see what kind of quality of light it would give me.  Nothing to write home about is what I found. I’d really like to get a ring flash adapter to play with (like the Orbis) and I was hoping the gridded light would give me a similar result, but it didn’t. Now, I don’t have a ring flash to compare it to, so this is just me guessing.  Here is the final shot:

It almost has that ring-light shadow quality to it, but not quite.  For the key light I used the Lumiquest SBIII – small, but soft.  It kind of reminds me of a beauty dish – not soft but not hard.  It was pretty close to me on camera right and high – you can tell by the shadow on my nose.  Not a bad portrait (well, except for the subject) and easy to set up.  I want to try a variation on this setup with the grid light being 1/3 to 1/2 stop above the key light (instead of the 1/2 to full stop below the key as it is here) which is supposed to be a good look for female portraits – helps to hide wrinkles and blemishes.

The next setup I tried is a pretty standard setup – gridded light for the background along with a high key light with a reflector for fill.  Here is the setup:

Same to flashes and modifiers, just changed the positions a little.  The gridded light moved to the background light and the SBIII key light was lowered and feathered away some.  I also added in a hand-held reflector to add some fill to the semi-harsh shadows created by the SBIII.  I just held it in my hands and angled it up towards my face as I was shooting.  Multi-tasking at its finest!  Here is the result:

I positioned the key light in a way that it would create those deep shadows in my eyes to try and create a little mystery and drama.  The background light was a little lower than I wanted it to be, but it still worked for this shot.  The halo is supposed to be around my head I suppose, but whatever. It’s hard when you’re shooting yourself and you can’t see what’s going on without getting up after every shot and checking.

I also messed around with some different Photoshop techniques.  The second shot has my usual workflow applied whereas the first shot used some techniques I picked up from watching Joey L‘s first DVD.  Now if I could only get my hands on his new DVD, Sessions with Joey L…

The last few self-portraits have been pretty high-key so for this one I wanted to drop it down low…WAY low.  I’ve seen some pretty cool low-key shots done by people like Zack Arias and Dustin Diaz so I figured I’d give it a go.  I couldn’t decide which one I liked better: the one above was Josi’s favorite and the one below is my favorite:

Everything is exactly the same, setup-wise, just my pose is different.  I tried so hard in these shots to not have my typical glare, so hopefully all of you will appreciate that.

My aim for these shots was to have them be very underexposed to the point that most everything is pure black and what little is there fades to black pretty quickly.  I was working in my room again so there was light bouncing everywhere, which made it fairly difficult, but I think I did ok.  I used a single light source for this one: my SB-800 into my 43″ silver umbrella.  But, to keep most of the light off of me I feathered it away from me so just the edge of the umbrella was lighting me – then I dialed the power down way low, 1/64 to be exact, and fired off several shots using my wireless remote.  Here is the setup shot:

It was a quick setup and the whole shoot took me no more than 10 minutes tops from setup to teardown.  I’m not saying I was being a slacker, just that the shot I wanted this week was fairly simple to setup and execute.  I’ve got a couple of more complex shots in mind for the coming weeks so watch for those.

My goal for this coming week, along with my next Project 52 shot, is to do a fairly extensive blog post about my experience at Don Giannatti‘s Lighting Essentials workshop that I attended last week.  If you haven’t seen my shots from the workshop be sure to check out my Flickr set featuring my favorites. Several of those shots will be featured in my blog post this week as well, so watch for it!

Another high-key self portrait.  What can ya do?  At least I’m getting away from the usual awkward glare that normally haunts my self portraits. I really like the way this one turned out though – it’s fairly different from my usual stuff.

I initially got the idea for this shot about a month ago when I came across the August 14, 2009 issue of Entertainment Weekly in my office break room.  The cover was for District 9 (great movie, BTW) and I really liked the composition of the shot.  Here is a quick look at it:

Something about the composition really pulled me in.

Now, I lit this one completely differently.  Mostly because I just had the composition in my head and didn’t have the magazine in front of me.  I was over at Eliesha’s along with Jason waiting for a couple of models to show up to do a fashion/lingerie shoot – long story short, they never showed up.  Rather than waste the setup we convinced Eliehsa to model for us (post about that later), and while she was getting ready I hopped in and grabbed this shot of myself.

We used the same setup the whole night: white seamless paper, two Alienbees (B400 and B800) at 1/4 power as background lights (to get pure white) – these lights where flagged with some black seamless paper scraps, and a Photogenic StudioMax III in a 22″ beauty dish as the main light.  I really liked this lighting setup – it worked pretty well for all of the shots we did that night, including this one of me.  Here is the setup shot:

As far as post-processing goes I used my usual routine that has been seen on most of my self portraits.  It’s a look I like and it’s getting pretty easy for me to do in Photoshop.  It’s a much different look from the Entertainment Weekly cover, but it works for me none-the-less.  I ALMOST gave myself the alien eye, almost, but decided against it.  Maybe I’ll go back and try that some day.

I’ve already got next week’s shot in mind, so hopefully I can get it knocked out early and have most of the week to edit it.  It will be a fairly intensive Photoshop process, so the extra time would be good.  It’ll be an experiment with having a specific final product in mind that will require Photoshop to get the end result, so I’ll need to light, compose, and execute the initial shot with that in mind.

I also have a couple of other shoots I’m finishing up the editing on that should have their own blog posts coming soon. So watch for those!

These, and many, many more, are questions that are racing through my head constantly, and have been for the past two years.  I picked up my first DSLR around two and a half years ago, a basic little Canon Digital Rebel XTi with the 18-55mm kit lens, because I’ve always had an interest in photography and wanted to try and pick it up as a hobby.  Things just haven’t been the same since then.

Something about photography is constantly burning inside of me – the desire to improve, the desire to take the next step. And I couldn’t explain what that was, what about photography kept sucking me in deeper, until a couple of days ago.

I’ve been reading David duChemin‘s book “Within The Frame” for a little while now (I’m a slow reader, so it takes time for me to read, especially a book as good as this one) and once I read a few paragraphs of Chapter 3, titled The Artist and the Geek, it hit me.  Here’s a quote from the book that really hit it home for me:

It’s as though photographers are afflicted with a chronic split personality.  One personality is the Artist, the other the Geek.  One is Vision, the other Craft, or Technique, and in the middle where they meet is the art of photography – the expression of our unique vision through practiced technique.  Great photography happens where craft and vision meet.

Now, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense unless you know me personally, so let me give you a little back story.

I’ve always been a geek.  For as long as I or my parents can remember I was the little geek/nerd/whatever you want to call it.  From sticking screw drivers into every hole I could find just because I could, to taking apart an old radio and filling it up with water when it’s plugged in just to see what would happen, to taking the most random gadgets to school and finding interesting ways to use them earning me the nickname “Gadget Boy,” to writing code just for fun, I have always been a geek.  Good at math and science.  Hell, I got a degree in Computer Information Systems and I’m currently a software developer – nothing says geek more than that does.

But, it wasn’t enough.  There has always been something else, something more, deep inside me that wanted to be let out.  Creativity.  My “left-brain” was satisfied but my “right-brain” was laying dormant, waiting to be unleashed.

It’s not like I never had an outlet for my creativity.  I was in band in high school and college – I played five different instruments throughout that time.  I also learned some guitar along the way.  I used to draw.  I made my own music videos and experimented with video editing in general for a while.  I’m a doodler.  Look at any of my notebooks at work and you’ll find all kinds of random doodles and drawings.  Part of my job as a software engineer has me creating lots of web pages which allows a small outlet for my creativity as well.

But they were always separate.  Geek and artist. Thinking and creating.  Left brain and right brain.  Until I found photography.

Photography lets me blend what I’m good at – being a geek – with that fire burning inside – being creative.  There are many technical aspects of photography to master: f-stops, shutter speeds, apertures, ISO, lighting, the inverse square law, mega-pixels, formats, etc.  I could go on and on about the technical aspects of photography.  It’s this side of photography that appeals to the geek in me.  I love reading about new lenses, new camera technologies, flashes, lighting techniques, you name it.  But this is only half the battle.  The geeky, technical stuff is just the means to an end, with the end being creativity.

Armed with this technical knowledge I can then go out and create.  Create images that appeal things deep inside myself, images that appeal to other people, and even images that no one really likes but if they were never created then I wouldn’t have learned anything.  I can use the techniques I’ve learned to create the image I see in my head.  Photography is not only about having an idea, its about being able to visualize that idea and execute it.

It’s this combination of technical and creative that keeps bringing me back, keeps driving me to learn more, shoot more – to take my photography to the next level.  It’s the perfect blend of geek and artist – both of which run strong through my veins.

I recently read an interview with Daron Shade over at Lighting Essentials that had another quote it in that reinforces everything I’ve been thinking and writing about – this balance between artist and geek:

I love the mix of art and science, measurement and judgment, artist and technician.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.  In fact, that’s pretty much what I’ve been trying to say this entire post.  I love both aspects of it – the art and the science – and seamlessly blending those two together to create something that is more than just 1′s and 0′s, more than just photons blasting through the air, more than just a person standing in the rain.  Creating photographs that mean something to me, to you, to whoever finds meaning in them, or even those who just think it’s a nice picture. That’s why photography is right for me.

Please let me know what you think!

Could that title have any more hyphens in it?  Probably, but we won’t push it.

Sorry this one is so late.  Been playing Batman: Arkham Asylum most of the weekend and got the urge to watch Batman Begins again, so we just got finished with that.  Aside from that I had a shoot on Friday night and one this afternoon, plus I’ve been upgrading the hard drive in my Macbook Pro and upgrading to Snow Leopard, so it’s been a busy weekend.  Luckily I got this one shot early in the week so I just had to finish up the post-production.

I got the idea for this shot while re-watching Zack Arias‘ OneLight DVD.  On Disc 1 he does a quick shoot in the studio using a single flash – a Sunpak 120J – to create a high-key portrait.  He also says it would be difficult to do without a bare-bulb flash, so since I don’t have a 120J I decided to make it work with my Nikon SB-800.  I think the SB-800 did a fine job at making me look much better than I normally do, so I’m calling this one a win.

The setup, as the title implies, was rather simple.  A single Nikon SB-800 directly behind me on the bed at 1/2 power with the dome diffuser, aimed up at the ceiling.  There was a white wall on camera left to provide a nice bounce surface.  This blew the back wall out and created a nice wrapping light on me.  To spice it up just a bit I added a silver reflector on camera right to add just a little bit more light to my face.  Here is the setup shot:

Ignore the messiness of the desk and night stand.

I did a good amount of Photoshopping on this one if it isn’t terribly obvious.  I really like this look – the high-contrast, sharp, gritty, slightly desaturated look.  Maybe I should do all my shots like this and call it the Matt DeWitt Look.  Or maybe not.  Here is what the shot looked like fresh out of the camera:

Pretty drastic change. I think I’ve just about locked down my workflow for getting this look since I’ve used it on a few shots now. Hopefully one day in the near future I can write a blog post about achieving this look.  It’s really not that complicated.  Probably takes 30 minutes to an hour tops to do.  Until then, here is a quick look at my final layers palatte:

That’s it for tonight.  You stay classy, Earth!

I had a pretty cool idea for this week’s shoot…buuuut I wasn’t able to get it done, so instead you’ll have to settle for this much more boring headshot of me.  Maybe next week I can get the shot I want.  I don’t want to give too much away, but the name of the shoot will be “Streetlights, People…” after probably the best song ever: Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”.

Back to this week’s shot.  Nothing too special.  Two-light setup done in my living room.  Josi was here this weekend to help me with it, so she actually snapped the shot – it’s just easier than trying to set up the tripod, getting the focus right, composition, etc.  Here she is in the setup shot (facing the wrong way, though for this week:

I did try a couple new tricks during post this week.  This week Scott Kelby featured Bill Simone for his Guest Blog Wednesday and Bill offered some great Photoshop tips, so I decided to mess around with them.  The biggest one worth mentioning is the use of Tony Kuyper‘s Luminosity Masks.  He has a great tutorial on his site about what they do and how they use them, so I won’t go into much detail about them here.  Just know that they rock and you should check them out too.

That’s about it for this week.  Nothing too special or exciting.  Not too happy about this week’s shot, but I know they all aren’t going to be great.  Here’s hoping that next week’s is better…