Matt DeWitt Photography Blog

Happy Valentine’s Day! I’m going to keep this post pretty brief because it’s keeping me from spending time with my girlfriend, Josi, but I wanted to take a few minutes and share a couple of pictures from a recent session I did with Josi’s friend, Wing.

We decided to head downtown at night to get some cool urban night shots, which is cool, but the bad part about this was the fact that it was freezing out. Since it was so cold, and since we were shooting at night, I decided to stick with my 50mm f/1.8 for low-light shooting and a single light stand with a Nikon SB-600 and a Westcott 28″ Apollo softbox. I didn’t want to lug around a bunch of gear in the cold, so I kept it simple and made what I brought with me work.

We started with a fun kissy-face shot, above, and then moved on to a couple shot as Wing’s boyfriend came along for moral support. Here they are in the doorway of this cool old building downtown:

He’s quite a bit taller than her, which made it hard to get a good shot of them together, but I think this one turned out pretty well.

After that we headed to the top of one of the parking garages downtown (as seen in this post) to finish up and I snapped another, sexier, kissy-face shot of Wing in a nice evening dress:

At this point we both had had enough of the cold and decided to call it quits for the evening, but not before I snapped over 200 shots, which was way more than I had anticipated shooting. I’ve got a few others I’ll share as I get them edited.

I’ve also got another shoot coming up this week that I’m excited about. Hopefully I can get everything edited by next Sunday so that I can share them with you then. I think you’ll like them.

Man, I gotta stop going so long between posts. I’ve been busy though, so at least that’s something. Busy shooting and editing the shots from this post and busy working on stuff for my business. I won’t bore you with all the business details like fictitious name registration, sales tax licenses, business licenses, checking accounts, etc., but I will talk a little about the recent St. Louis Strobist Meetup I attended towards the end of January.

I blogged about this time last year about attending the meetup up in St. Louis and decided to go again this year. Everyone I met and worked with last time was great, so it was a no brainer to go do it again. We shot in the same warehouse as last year, so I knew going in that I didn’t have a lot to work with, environment wise, so I decided to spice it up this year by bringing a smoke machine and really pushing my lighting skills to the limit and then coming back and pushing my post-processing techniques even further.

So, let’s talk about the image at the top of the post first, since I really like it and apparently lots of other people do (according to Flickr and Facebook). It really is a shining example of great lighting and even better post-processing. I knew I wanted some hard edge/rim light so I used two SB-600’s with Honl Grids on camera left and right to edge and rim Lauren out.  I spent a while adjusting these so they were lighting her where I wanted and once I got those done I brought in an SB-900 front camera right in my Westcott Apollo softbox for the key light.  Once I had everything set up I’d just have Lauren do a few pushups and fire the smoke machine, shoot a few frames, and repeat.  I got several shots from this setup that I liked, but the one above really stood out as being the best of the bunch.

The post-processing was my spin on Scott Kelby’s Extended Definition Processing (see his tutorial on the NAPP website here). I modified it a little to suit my tastes, threw in some skin softening via the Joel Grimes Skin Retouching tutorial, and played with a few layer masks and called it good. I got such good reception from this photo that I’m thinking about doing a tutorial on the whole process in the near future.

While I had that hard/edgy light set up I just raised it up to shoot a couple of quick portraits using it of George, above, and his wife, Christy, below.

I post-processed these shots in a very similar manner to the one at the top of this post of Lauren. It’s definitely a look I dig and I’ll be trying to do more of it in the future.

There was also a couple of bands there for us to shoot, and since I’d never shot a band I had to give it a try. I grabbed these four guys from the band Brown Bottle Fever and shoved them into this tight garage space and went to town lighting them. Lighting four guys evenly in a tight space is no easy feat!

I ended up using four lights for this shot: a gridded SB-600 back left, an SB-900 with the dome diffuser behind the band, another gridded SB-600 camera right, and finally, an SB-800 into a homemade beauty dish for the main light on camera right.  It still didn’t look very good SooC, so I played around with it a bunch in Photoshop and came up with the shot above.  It’s ok. I definitely need more small group practice – I guess I need to find some local bands in need of press kit material.

Lastly I decided to try some tighter beauty style shots with Brandy. For these type of shots I should have shot with a smaller aperture, say f/11-ish, but I decided to be crazy and shoot this one at f/4, just for the fun of it. I miss the detail, but I like the shallow depth of field, so it works out ok. I used the same Joel Grimes skin softening technique mentioned above on this shot. I really like this technique and will be using it for all of my skin softening in the future.

That’s about it for this post. You can see some more shots I did of the meetup on my Flickr by clicking here and you can also see everyone’s shots from the meetup here.  Make sure you check them out as there is a lot of good talent and creativity flowing up in St. Louis. Hopefully I can get another local meetup going in the near future as driving 7 hours in one day isn’t fun, even though I did have lots of fun once I got there.

Stay tuned for more!

I’ve seen several shots like this recently and I liked the idea so I decided to give it a try myself. The latest one I saw that I really liked was shot by one of my favorite photographer’s, Douglas Sonders, where he shot the cover for Independent Banker Magazine. After thinking about how I wanted mine to look I headed out this afternoon with Josi to make it happen.

I wanted to do something similar to Douglas’ shot, with the clouds in the background, but unfortunately for us we had a pretty overcast sky with just a little bit of defined clouds in the sky. Lucky for me I got a decent shot of them before they broke up while I was getting my base exposure set up, so then I just had to tweak it and drop it into my final shots. It was cloudy and overcast, but that didn’t really help my exposure out – I ended up shooting at 1/200th at f/8 at ISO 100 to get the definition in the clouds that I wanted, so that meant my flashes were going to have to work harder than usual. And, once I had my camera setup on the tripod the clouds began to break up and move leaving me with a pretty uninteresting background.

I ended up using a two-light, cross light setup for this shot. My key light was the SB-800 at full power camera right into my new 43″ while umbrella (the old one had seen much better days) and for a slight rim light I used the SB-600 at 1/2 power through a Honl grid. Here is the setup shot:

There was quite a bit of Photoshop involved with creating the final image, and there is definitely much room more improvement. I really need to work on my masking and compositing skills. Regardless of that, I think I did a decent job. I took the shot of the clouds and edited it to be bluer and boosted its contrast and clarity to make it very well defined to use as the backgrounds. I stuck the shot of me holding the camera on top of it and did my best to mask away the crappy sky in order to reveal the good sky. After I got that done I moved on the the portrait itself.

I used the same cloudy background for the portrait and masked away the crappy background once again. Then I did my usual retouching, skin softening, sharpening, and soft light/high pass layers until I got the portrait looking good. I then made a new copy of the finished portrait and resized it to fit over the screen of the iPhone. I finished the whole thing up with a curves layer in Photoshop and them some slight warming and vignetting in Lightroom.

There’s definitely room to improve, especially in the masking part of composites. I’ll continue to practice and hopefully get better at it. Practice, practice, practice.

I also did one of Josi while we were out:

She wasn’t too happy to be out because it was a little chilly, but she’s a trooper for helping me anyway. Thanks, Josi!

That’s it for this week. Until next time…

A few months back one of my friends that I’ve shot with a lot asked me if I would help her put together a calendar to give to her boyfriend for Christmas. I’ve been wanting to do a project like that for a while, so I happily accepted. It ended up being a lot of work, but it was pretty fun. I wish we could have went outside for more shots, but we did the best we could.

Some of the shots are shots I’ve shown before, but I also want to share a few new ones we took just for the calendar, so here is a preview of the 2010 Kristen Calendar!

February

June

August

November

The rest were either too revealing or not as exciting as these. It took a long time to put this together, even with re-using some shots that we had done in the past. I think we did 3 or 4 separate shoots to get the missing months and then we tried different ideas for each month. Then there was all of the editing and post-production to be done. We spent a lot of time together working on this, so I hope her boyfriend appreciates it.

If you want to know more about how a shot was lit you can click the image to go to it’s Flickr page and read more about it. This is definitely something I’d like to offer to other people, but because of the amount of time and planning involved it wouldn’t be something cheap. If you conservatively plan for an hour per month for shooting, you’re at 12 hours already, plus a few hours for planning, and then probably at least another hour per month for post-production and you’re looking at about a 30 hour project, minimum. At commercial photographer rates you’re looking at about 3-4 days worth of creative fees, which could run anywhere from $500/day to $10,000/day, or if I were to just charge a very nice hourly rate of $20/hour you’re still looking at $600 minimum, or a more realistic hourly rate of $50 or more would push it up to $1,500 or more. I’d settle for a happy medium around $1000, depending on the shoots you would want.

So, it wouldn’t be a cheap project/present, but it would definitely be unique. A one-of-a-kind calendar for that special someone in your life. I’d definitely be willing to do it again, so if you’re interested in getting a calendar made and are willing to put in the time and effort and can afford it, shoot me an email and we can make it happen!

Ahh, Colorado, how I miss you some times.  Josi and I are here in Fort Collins visiting my family for Christmas – it’s a much needed vacation for me and it could possibly be Josi’s last American Christmas, so I had here come home with me so she could spend it with my family and I.  We got here on Friday and have just been taking it easy the last few days. We went to visit my grandpa in the hospital (he’s home now though, yay!), wrapped some presents, and watch lots of movies already. Josi has been wanting to take some snow pictures for a while now and since there is a little snow still left on the ground we decided to head out this afternoon to see what kind of pictures we could take.

I really wanted to get a little higher up so we could get some mountains in the background so we headed over to an elevated railroad track near my house to start out our adventure.  And it sure felt like an adventure with the climbing we did to get up there – traversing snow, ice, and lots of mud. We made it up and started to set up for our first shot:

This picture pretty much has it all: a beautiful girl, snow, mountains, some solar flare.  A little bit of post in Lightroom really made this shot pop. Since the sun was still high and bright we were shooting at fairly small apertures – f/16 here (based on the rule of full sun exposure = f/16 @ 1/ISO) – so we had to use a lot of flash power to get a good exposure on Josi.  I set up my SB-800 on a stand and then super-clamped an SB-600 to the stand and had them both firing into a silver umbrella just barely out of frame camera right to get a decent exposure on Josi.  After I shot a few shots of here she snapped a few of me and then we moved on to a new pose:

This shot was mostly for me to play with some high-speed sync.  Since I already had two flashes set up I figured I could push a little power and bumped my shutter speed up to 1/2000 of a second which gave me a working aperture of around f/2.8 using high-speed sync. Josi was cross-lit between the flashes and the sun, but it doesn’t look unnatural because of the angles of the light.  She doesn’t look so happy in the picture, but I was pretty happy because I got to try out high-speed sync and was pretty happy with the results.

After we were done up here we packed up and headed closer to the foothills for sunset.  We found this nice little trail and hiking area not too far from my parent’s house so we stopped there to finish up our first Colorado photography expedition.  We walked a little down the trail and stopped where we found a good shooting spot on either side of the trail.  The first shot we did there was this:

We still had a good amount of sun coming from camera left and I didn’t want to ruin that with flash so I just used a single, bare SB-800 off to camera right zoomed into 105mm just to give a little kick that matched the ambient sun exposure.  It created some harsh shadows, but since I wasn’t doing a close up I figured it would be ok.  You can see the base of the foothills in the background and the late afternoon sun adds a nice glow to the snow and the tall grass in the background.

We finished up with the shot at the beginning of the post – my favorite from the day.  This shot was done similar to the first shot of the day – overpowering the sun with two full power flashes off to camera right.  I just played around with the composition until I got the sun in a spot that I liked and snapped a few shots and we called it a day.

I didn’t use any Photoshop on these – it was all done in Lightroom.  Lately I feel like I’ve been spending too much time in Photoshop, so for these I decided to take a step back and focus more on the images themselves rather than the post-production.

We’re supposed to get some snow in the next few days so hopefully we can get out and play in the snow and take some pictures.  In the mean time, check out a few shots that Josi got of me during out outing today:

Make sure you check out the rest of her Flickr Photostream too – she’s got some nice shots there (probably because I’m such a wonderful teacher :-p).

Have a safe and Happy Holidays, everyone!

I didn’t really have anything exciting or interesting planned for this week so I spent one evening messing with some two-light setups in my hallway.  I pinned up a white sheet and set up a little stool for me to sit on and messed around with a couple lighting setups I wanted to try.

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…

Look at me! I’m all white and pasty and emotionless. Ladies please, one at a time.  If you couldn’t tell, I’m not a fan of the series. I finally broke down and watched the first one this holiday weekend and I can’t see what all the fuss is about. I just don’t understand is what many girls have told me when I ask.  Oh well.  I don’t have to understand to know that it’s crap! But despite my loathing of the series, I am kind of a fan of the promotional materials that Joey L. shot for the first movie; and of Joey’s work overall. So while I was driving home from filming some clips for my entry into the Nikon Festival I decided to pull of into a wooded area and shoot a quick self-portrait to try and make myself look all vampirey.

I’ve heard/read interviews with Joey about shooting the Twilight campaign and he said he used something like 10 lights.  Wow – I don’t have 10 lights, so I just made due with the two that I do have.  I wasn’t out to try and exactly replicate Joey’s awesome work (I wish it was that easy) – I just wanted something kind of close that I could play with in Photoshop.

On my way home I just turned down a side road where I would have easy access to a wooded area from the road and parked my car and started pulling equipment out of my trunk.  I went with a two-light, cross-light setup for this shot.  For my main light I used my Westcott Apollo 28″ softbox with my SB-800 on camera right.  My camera metered the scene at 1/80 at f/4 at ISO 100, so I underexposed by 1 1/3 stop and boosted my key light to 1/4 power which brought the key light up to around f/5.6 – giving me some brightness and glow over the ambient.  I used the underexposed ambient as a fill light and then brought in the SB-600 on camera left for some side lighting.  I wanted this one harsher, so I left it bare and zoomed it to 85mm.  I probably should have used a grid, but it was chilly outside, and I hate the cold.  I dropped the power on this one to 1/16 to be about 1/3 to 1/2 stop under my key light.

Here is the setup shot:

Make sure you view it larger to read the labels.

From setup to teardown it might have taken me 15 minutes tops to get the shot.  Not too shabby.  Then it was home to watch some football and after that I edited this shot and now I’m writing this blog post for all of you!

Total Photoshop time was about 45 minutes I’ll say.  I’ve gotten pretty good at editing portraits in a style that I like, which is good.  Just to give you an idea of what all was done, here is the before shot with very little editing, just some minor Lightroom adjustments:

Here is a quick rundown of the edits I did, starting from the bottom of my layers palette working up. Removed the branch coming out of my head, cleaned up my skin (because it looks awful always), brightened the eyes.  Merge the layers and then liquify the get rid of my belly.  Darken the background some using a Curves adjustment layer.  Softened the skin with Nik Color Efex Pro.  Used some Luminosity Masks to boost the highlights and shadows.  Merged all of that into a new layer, sharpened the layer then duplicated it.  Desaturated the duplicate and set the blend mode to Soft Light.  Ran the High Pass filter on that layer and dropped the opacity to lessen the effect.  Then I made some final Curves and Hue/Saturation adjustments layers and finished it off with a vignette in Lightroom.  There you have it – the cliff notes version of my editing workflow.

I have a few shot ideas lined up for the next few weeks and then I’ll be heading to Colorado for the holidays, so hopefully I can get some sweet shots of mountains and snow while I’m out there.  Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving – bring on Christmas!

I know it’s not Sunday yet, but I’m going to be out of town this weekend for Halloween and I’ll be busy on Sunday when we get back.  Plus, I’m really excited about these images so I just couldn’t wait any longer to share them with you!

Kristen mentioned doing a sports shoot a while back so this past week we got together and made it happen.  We went to the stadium at our (her present and my past) college hoping the stadium lights would be on, but, they weren’t, so we had to make the best with what we had.  Plus, when we got there the Ultimate Frisbee teams were playing on the field, so we had to shoot off to the side for a while.

When she mentioned the sports shoot this (the shot above) was one of the first shots that came to my mind.  I wanted a close-up portrait off to one side lit with some hard light and a little background.  Then I planned to heavily post-process the image to give it a hard, gritty, high-contrast, Sports Illustrated kind of look.  Mission accomplished.

The shot was a 2-light setup – the SB600 in the Lumiquest SBIII on camera left to create a semi-soft/hard key light and then I added in the SB800 zoomed to 105mm on back camera right for the hard rim/separation light.  It created a nice contrasty light that gave me a lot of room to play during post-production.  And play I did.  This looks is a combination of several adjustments in Lightroom 3 Beta followed by some layering/masking in Photoshop.  I really dig this look for shots like this.

We used the same lighting setup for this shot, I just backed out a little farther.  I used the same lens for all of these shots – the Nikon 50mm f/1.8 – so all of my composition adjustments had to be done by foot.  I processed this one a little differently to leave a little more color in so it would look different compared to the first shot.  Gotta have variety.

After we were done with these shots the field had opened up so we were free to move on and setup the next few shots.  I really wanted shots of the field in the background, but without the stadium lights being on there was nothing I could do, so I improvised to make sure I lit up enough of the field around Kristen to give the images some context while letting the background go black.

Before anyone says anything, yes, I know she’s facing the wrong way.  I wanted to get the numbers in the shot a little bit and have the yard line lead the eyes down the middle.  It’s wrong, but it’s right for what I wanted.  I went with a hard/soft light combo for this one.  I had the SB600 on camera right through a white umbrella to give her a base fill and also light up the field around her and then I just added in the SB800 on the opposite side and bare to brighten her up and add some contrast to the shot.  I used a similar post-processing technique as the shots above, but I didn’t go as extreme on the details like I did the first 2 shots.

Again I used the same light setup as the previous shot in order to knock out a few different poses pretty quickly.  She wanted to do the Heisman pose, so I lined her up on the numbers on the field just to keep the ground interesting.  Snapped a few shots while she held the pose and we were done. Same post-processing as the shot above.

For the final shot we wanted to do an action shot, but being able to successfully line everything up involved with a shot like that is no easy task, so we took the easy way out.  Fix it in post!

I had her lay on the ground and act like she was diving for the ball – combine that with a slightly skewed camera angle and some easy Photoshop tricks I think we have a fairly compelling action shot.  She nailed the pose and the look pretty well, which made it easier.  I used the same post-processing tricks as before plus I added a little bit of a motion blur to make the image feel a little more interesting. I like it.

Not only is this week’s Project 52 shot a few days early, you also get 5 shots instead of 1.  This is more of what I’d like to be doing – set up a shoot with a theme/concept and come away with 3 to 5 great shots.  We did pretty well on this one; I was very happy with the outcome.  I’m working on another concept shot for the next few weeks so once that happens I should hopefully have another set of good images to share.

I hope you enjoy these as much as I do.  Please visit the Flickr page for each shot (just click on the image) and leave your comments and feedback so I know what you like and don’t like.  Have a Happy Halloween!

I know I haven’t had blog posts for my recent Project 52 shots, but fear not!  I’ve been posting them and if you follow me (if you’re not, you should!) on Twitter or on Flickr then you’ve probably seen them already.  Just wanted to get the blog up to date on the project.

Week 15

A shot from the recent SWMO Strobist Meetup. Hopefully a blog post on this soon.

Week 14

A shot from a recent engagement shoot I did.  Possibly a blog post for this as well.

Week 13

Playing with my new Gorillapod and trying some motion shots in the car.  A few more shots planned like this.

Week 11

Shot during the Lighting Essentials workshop I attended in St. Louis.  View my blog post about the workshop here.

I think that does it for shots I’ve missed on the blog.  I’ve got a pretty badass sports-themed shot for this week, so watch for that this weekend.  I’ve also got a few ideas for upcoming shots, so hopefully I can pull those off and have some fun stuff to share with everyone.

Check my Twitter and Flickr for my most recent shots, just in case they don’t make it here to the blog.

Last week I got the opportunity to help out my company’s Internal Communications dept. once again by shooting some photos that they needed.  We were having our annual strategic planning meeting, which means that all of the VPs, CEOs, and other important people would all be together for a day-long meeting.  Knowing this, we decided to set up an area to shoot some updated headshots for our various publications while they were on break.

There are a few problems with this, though.  We work in an office building, so there’s not a whole lot of places to shoot a good headshot, and, these people are pretty important – the kind of people you are lucky to get 5 minutes with on a good day, but this wasn’t a good day, so I was lucky to get about 30 seconds per person.  Great.

So, we had to improvise.  For the location we ended up in a conference room (I bet you NEVER would have guessed that ), which didn’t leave us with a lot of options.  We had a lame (think elementary school portraits) muslin background that we could have thrown up, but I wasn’t going to let that happen.  I’d much rather have a nice, solid, neutral background.  Luckily, the conference room walls were white (or fairly close to it) so we pushed the tables out of the way to give us some working room and setup our shooting position in such a way that there wouldn’t be much light falling on the background so it would drop to a nice gray color.

So, the background was taken care of – now we just needed a good lighting setup in a tight space. Enter the speedlights and CLS!  Big studio lights and cords would have caused all kinds of problems and hazards.  Using the little battery powered strobes allowed me to set up a nice cross-light setup in a very small space that worked quite nicely for these portraits.

For the key light I set up a Nikon SB-900 inside of the 28″ Westcott Apollo softbox and set it on camera left.  I wanted a solid aperture for these portraits to keep them sharp and detailed, so I shot at f/8 at ISO 200, which is cake for the speedlights.  I had the key setup in a nice 3/4 position to provide enough light on the VP’s faces and still provide some definition via shadow.

With the key set I set up a nice kicker/fill/rim light on back camera left just to provide a little more visual interest and pop to the photos.  This was done by setting up my Nikon SB-600 on top of one of the tables we moved out of the way into a silver umbrella.  I used the umbrella to provide some spread to the second light and soften it up as corporate headshots generally don’t lend themselves well to hard directional light.

Once the lights were up it was just a matter of dialing in the power for a good exposure and waiting for the VPs to come by.  I shot tethered so I could easily check focus and exposure, plus I thought it’d make me look a little more professional, which is important when dealing with important senior management people.

Once they finally came by I got about what I thought I would get with each one – about 30-45 seconds.  I had them stand in position, shot a frame and checked and made sure everything looked good, and then fired a few more off just to be safe and moved on to the next one.  I shot 13 VPs, including the CEO, all in about 8 minutes.  That’s what happens when you work with important people.  Best to be prepared and be flexible.  I pre-planned most of this the night before so I could set up and be ready for them.  Total setup time was probably 10-15 minutes and total shooting time was no more than 10 minutes tops.  13 VPs in less than 30 minutes total from start to finish.  Not too bad.

I edited the shots in the Lightroom 3 Beta, just to give it a shot.  Lots of other people have already talked about it, so I won’t get into it here.  It’s pretty cool so far – nothing too revolutionary.  I do really like the improved sharpening, though.  I probably spent an hour total editing these shots – once I got the look I wanted it was easy to sync it with the rest and tweak the colors where needed.

After I everything I’d say this was a pretty successful shoot.  I was pretty nervous about it, but thanks to everything I’ve learned so far it was pretty easy to set something up and make some good images.

Practice makes perfect!