inContrast Blog

I'm sure it goes without saying, but I haven't been posting on this blog lately.

If you would like to see some of my more current work, check out our blog at www.incontrastimages.blogspot.com or our website at www.incontrastimages.com.

Tres & I keep these sites up to date with all of the wedding & portrait work we've been doing, as well as our personal work. Go have a look & let us know what you think! :)

Lookout

About Time

Some photos from when I was out with Tres & Joel one night back in August.

Greensboro's Dirty Parts

Some stuff I shot downtown one night (probably a month ago) when out with Tres' & Joel. I wish I had more time to shoot & edit things like this. I miss it.

New Blog

Hey everyone!

I know it has been a while since I've updated, but now that I'm finally finished with school, it's time to get down to business.

Tres & I are now working together shooting weddings & portraits under the name of inContrast. We're pretty excited about getting things started up.

You can check out our website at www.incontrastimages.com
& our new blog at incontrastimages.blogspot.com

Thank you all for still visiting, even through my times of scarce blogging!

Duchess Bath Products

The Duchess product line from Target. Fun, girly packaging called for a bright background & propping with flowers. Shot this a few weeks ago in the studio.

Polka Dot

Polka Dot Riesling bottle I shot in the studio a while back. Loved the bottle & packaging.

(to view my other work, click home to see the rest of my blog or visit www.incontrastimages.com)

Kevin Cap & Gown

Shot a friend's cap & gown pictures a few weeks ago in downtown Greensboro. Parking decks & colored walls galore.








Tres came along to help shoot, as usual. Awesome behind the scenes shots of course. We make photography look fun! ;)

Pontiac Solstice

A couple shots of the Solstice Tres, Stewart & I shot the other day in the studio.

Happy Mother's Day

Hope everyone got the chance to spend some top quality time with their moms yesterday. Here are some snapshots from our Mother's Day: the family, the dog, & the cards.

Easter

So, these are a bit overdue, but I found them while I was looking through photos today...

My aunt, no matter how old we get, sends me & my sister an Easter basket each year with the most amazing candy in it. Thought I'd take a few shots before devouring them this time. ;)






These chocolates shaped like bees & ladybugs were adorable. I had fun with them.

Samy Hair Products - Comparison

Is it just me or do mine look better than the shots from the official website? Maybe I'm just cocky...

But I was looking in a very prominent magazine the other day (Vogue, I believe) & I saw a Samy ad - the first one I had seen in print. Products in a row, on black, similar to mine, with the exception of: their products looked horrible! I was shocked to think that as a student photographer I was doing better photography of their products than the photography they paid Vogue full-page-ad price for.

Anyway. Food for thought..


THEIR SHOTS:

Prom 2007

Tres & I shot prom photos for his cousins, Jessica & Stephen, & their dates, Carroll & Madison, a couple weekends ago.

(We are supahfly.)

Winston-Salem: Kristen

Winston-Salem: Colt

Winston-Salem

For my internship, I put together a seniors shoot - everything from models to location & clothing. We went to Winston-Salem & shot downtown, in the Mellow Mushroom, & in the window of a cute diner.

Whitebox Weddings

Well, I started my internship last week at Whitebox Weddings with Sara Brennan-Harrell & Melanie Litchfield. I have really been enjoying it. We've already had a busy shoot at a daycare, a lunch meeting with photographer Melissa Jill, I've learned how to design a bridal album & I'm about to put together an engagement album, as well. They even shot Jessica & my headshots the other day, which was a lot of fun. I'm excited to see how the rest of the 8 weeks of internship goes. Sounds like we have lots of interesting things planned.

Samy Hair Products

images shot with Canon 20D
Alien Bees & Vivitar 285 flash
softbox & grids
ISO 100

Samy Salon Systems hair products... the first shot was for James' final assignment, the rest of the series I shot for myself. I'll be posting the other shots soon.

Done with Class

After Monday's class we will be done attending classes - only an online portfolio class in the summer. Pretty weird our time is already up - kind of sad.

So we are done posting for class, but I will keep updating as I shoot over internship & the summer - so keep checking back!

Triumph

Tres, Stewart & I shot a bike a few weeks ago as practice for shooting the Relay For Life bike. Here are a couple details (still need some retouching, obviously) & some setup shots - check out the giant 20x30' scrim we put up.

Acura

From a group project last week in James' class... It was a multiple exposure assignment, so our group went all out & decided to do a car. Different exposures & lighting for all the different parts.

Multimedia Project Rejects

Funny, but it seems like I left some of my better shots out of my Soundslides project altogether... they just didn't seem to fit.

Joint Project - Jewelry Part 2

images shot with Canon 20D
Broncolor strobes, mirrors & softbox
ISO 100

Graphic Designer: Julie Lane






Some shots from the second day of our shoot... a few hundred shots later & we were finally finished. Again, most of these will be for the website. The 2nd shot is for a magazine ad.

It was an interesting project to work on. I have had a lot of fun with it & am very happy with how they all turned out. Special thanks to Julie for all of her help! :)

Adventures in Jamestown

Tres & I went to shoot again at a waterfall in Jamestown the other day - complete with rusted, falling apart bridge & creepy building that looks straight out of a horror movie. It's kind of fun to get out of the studio & trek through the woods every once in a while. Ice was still melting from snow earlier that week.

Joint Project - Jewelry

images shot with Canon 20D
Broncolor strobes, mirrors & softbox
ISO 100

Graphic Designer: Julie Lane

Here are some shots I did last week for my joint project - the project we are doing with the graphic design students. Most of these are shots for the website Julie is putting together. Other shots we are working on are for magazine ads or postcards.

Pringles

image shot with Canon 20D
Broncolor strobes
ISO 100

We had an assignment for James' class where we got in groups, drew layouts for Pringles ads, then traded & shot the other groups' ads. I wasn't really looking forward to it - & definitely didn't think I'd get anything decent out of it - but it wound up being pretty fun. (Click on it. Color is off, yet again.)

Dessert

image shot with Canon 20D
Broncolor Fasion Kit & softbox
ISO 100

We shot a dessert shot for commercial class - close up, showing time & place.

Family

images shot with Canon 20D
Vivitar & Sunpak flashes with umbrellas
ISO 100




I helped Kristen over winter break with a project for her photography class. She did a family collage based on the photography of David Hockney. I helped set up the lighting & took a few shots inbetween. Love the couch, curtains & my grandpa's collection of clocks.

Album Art

images shot with Canon 20D
Alien Bees & fill card
ISO 100

Tres & I put together an album cover & poster for a band at a local high school recently. Shooting on location didn't work out at the last minute, so we wound up shooting on the school football field & Photoshopping them into a background shot in downtown Greensboro.

Model Shots

images shot with Canon 5D
Broncolor strobes
1/200 sec @ f/5.6
1/200 sec @ f/20
ISO 100
model: Lauren

Almost forgot about these. Back in mid-October for our final in James' commercial lighting class, he brought in a real model & makeup artist. Everyone in the class worked together on setting up different lighting schemes to shoot in. The first photo is with the lighting I came up with. Wanted something dramatic: softbox on the right; softbox as a hairlight from the back left.

Pretty pleased with the result. Very different working with a real model that so easily knows how to give the photographer the effect they're going for. Great work from the makeup artist as well. Made for a pretty interesting experience.

Headshots

images shot with Canon 20D
Alien Bees
ISO 100








A few more headshots from James' five people assignment. I went out on location with Alien Bees & a battery pack for some of the shots; indoors on the others.

Self Promos 5 & 6: Notebooks & Candle

image shot with Canon 20D
Broncolor strobe pack with softbox
1/125 sec @ f/6.3
ISO 100


image shot with Canon 20D
Alien Bee & fill card
1/200 sec @ f/8
ISO 100

Here are my final two self promos for the semester... we're already at the end of the eight weeks, ready to go on internship next week. I'm actually printing out my final portfolio for commercial class tomorrow right now. Hard to believe the time is already here.

Photo Stitching

images shot with Canon 20D
ISO 100

Five photos stitched together in Photoshop for our final assignment in digital class - water tower, foreground grass, background grass & trees, & two pictures of the sky. And check out that awesome amount of dust on my sensor... good times retouching it all out...

Headshots: Kate

images shot with Canon 20D
Vivitar 285 flash, natural light & fill card
ISO 100

The lovely Kate, shot today for the next part of our assignment for James. Two headshots each of five different people - each one with a different "look." Don't know how different these shots look, but they were shot different places with different clothes & hair...?

Headshots: Lindsey

images shot with Canon 20D
Alien Bees with softbox & Vivitar 285 flash
1/125 @ f/11
ISO 400

For James' class we had to do 6 commercial headshots of the same person, yet make all of them different. I tried different combinations of lighting with 2 Alien Bee heads, a Vivitar 285 as a rim light, a softbox, & a fill card. I also used different backgrounds & outfits to give a different effect.

Self Exploration

image shot with Canon 20D
Vivitar 285 flash
1/125 @ f/32
ISO 400

My creepy eyeball, shot for client assignment #5 in commercial illustration class. Local photographer Mark Wagoner visited our class & gave us an artistic self exploration assignment. I originally wanted to do a collage including different parts of my face, but found that just a close-up of my eye would be more dramatic & less cluttered.

Quite a bit of work in photoshop getting the colors, shadows, & look I wanted. Same with the iris & highlight in the eye. (As you can see from the original on the left)

Special thanks to Tres for focusing & snapping the photo, considering it is rather difficult to shoot a macro of your own face & get anything in focus ;)

Corkscrew Man

image shot with Canon 20D
stove light with fill card
1 sec @ f/8
ISO 100

For James' class, we had to pick a typically boring household item & make an exciting image out of it. I chose this corkscrew. Thought it looked like a little man when you pull its "arms" up. Wanted to concentrate on its shape & the shape of the shadow to add interest. Shot pretty wide to emphasize the shadow.

Ghetto setup, much? ;) I had monolights checked out for the night, but found that they were giving me too soft of a shadow. Tried everything I could think of until I finally settled for the little light over the stove. Worked very well for giving me a harder shadow since it's such a tiny light source. Suspended the corkscrew guy from the microwave with some white wire.

Body Luxury Bath Products

image shot with Canon 20D
Broncolor strobes through light table
1/250 sec @ f/9
ISO 100

Shot bath products for self promo #3. I wanted it to look really clean, so I put it them on a light table. Probably resembles biomedical photography more than commercial... I can just picture pills coming out instead of sea salts... But I guess that is the nature of using a light table for something like this.

Lollipops

image shot with Canon 20D
White Lightning
1/125 sec @ f/9
ISO 100

Shot these for self promo #4. Was shooting the other day while eating a lollipop & noticed how nice it looked backlit... yes, you know you have a problem when you notice the lighting on your Super Blow Pop. ;) Thought it could be an interesting exploration in color & negative space, as well as texture.

Head Shot on White: Josh

image shot with Canon 20D
Broncolor Strobes with softbox & umbrellas
1/125 sec @ f/11
ISO 100

I shot this for commercial illustration class a couple weeks ago. We had to do a head & shoulders portrait of a person on an even white background. Guess mine are a little more like head & torso... oh well. Thought it was more interesting to include the hands on this one.

I used a softbox & fill card on the model & two umbrellas bouncing off a white wall behind the subject to give me a white background.

Photographer Inspiration

image shot with Canon 20D
Broncolor Fashion Kit with softbox & umbrella
1/125 sec @ f/10
ISO 100

For James' class we had to find a photographer who we admire & do a shoot inspired by their work. I chose Australian fashion photographer Troyt Coburn, who I think has amazing work. Everything has beautiful colors & lighting, & his work comes off looking like paintings most of the time.

I don't know that my shot looks anything like Troyt's work, but hey... the point was to be inspired, not to copy their style... right? :/

I worked a lot with the lighting on this one. I wanted it to be soft with quite a bit of fill, but still look interesting & give the model shape. I used a large softbox as my main light & white fill cards on the front left to fill in the shadow side. It was important that the model stand out from the background, so I found that shooting a light through an umbrella from the back left helped give some definition.

Complicated setup with the semi-shiny background fabric (which never wanted to lay flat) & lighting for the all-black outfit. Some work in Photoshop to get the colors I wanted. Overall I am very happy with this.

Book Cover: Us and Them

image shot with Canon 20D
Alien Bee with softbox
1/125 sec @ f/9
ISO 100

I shot my book cover illustration tonight for "Us and Them: A History of Intolerance in America." I thought that since the book is centered around teaching tolerance, I'd focus on the issue of racism & show a sense of unity through the embracing hands of the different races. Probably a little cliche, but I think it's a good representative image of tolerance that people would easily recognize & understand.

I wanted to show this unity while still showing a strong juxtaposition between the two hands, emphasizing the differences between the two. It was important in following with the theme of the book to show contrast between the hands to portray how we still socially view the races as different, even though we are in a day & age where everyone is supposed to be equal. In addition to the difference in race, I also really wanted to show the strength of the man's hand & delicacy of the woman's. Lighting from the back left really helped this by making the texture & sculpted form of the man's hand stand out, while putting the woman's arm in more even lighting, making it look smooth, with a slight glow from the backlight.

Hotchkiss No. 1

image shot with Canon 20D
Broncolor strobe pack with softbox
1/250 sec @ f/14
ISO 100

For self promo number two I decided to shoot a stapler from the 1920's - again a random antique collectible of my dad's. The concept was to have stacks & stacks of paper in the background with the stapler all open & on laying on its side with staples strewn all around - the poor old stapler all stapled out.

Went out & bought five reams of paper... turns out 2500 sheets of paper doesn't look like as much paper as you'd think. I was kind of disappointed it didn't stack up to look like piles & piles of paper in the background like I had planned, so I had to work with it a bit to get it cropped where it looked like a lot more paper than it was. Not anything at all like I pictured it looking in my head, but it turned out alright. Really wish I had bought more paper so I could have pushed the stacks of paper much further into the background & use a really wide angle lens to really emphasize the stapler.

Sometimes things just don't work out as planned. That's the way it goes. Still came out with a decent result, so I guess I can't complain.

Drill: Aspirational Shot

image shot with Canon 20D
White Lightning with softbox
2 sec @ f/13
ISO 100

So I basically spent the last two days shooting this, & I'm really not thrilled about the result. Lighting the drill well while at the same time freezing motion AND getting a blur proved to be quite difficult. I tried pretty much every combination of shutter speed, drill speed, & balance of flash & natural light as possible.

Seems like the best setup was to set the monolight behind & slightly above the drill & fill in the bottom edge with an orange fill card (wanted to get kind of a glowing effect on the drill for interest). Light from windows behind helped add ambient light to allow for motion blur.

Drill: Product Shot

image shot with Canon 20D
Broncolor Fashion Kit & White Lightning with softbox
1/250 @ f/20
ISO 100

For commercial illustration class we were given an assignment to do a product shot on a plain white background. We also have to do a shot that makes you want to buy the product & must include motion as a major element, so I chose to shoot a drill.

This is my product shot. In order to give me a white, evenly lit background, I shot against a softbox & then lit it from the front left with an umbrella. I had to be careful to avoid flare, while still blowing out the background.

Baked Goods

image shot with Sinar F1 on Kodak E-100G transparency film
Broncolor strobe pack & Farrell light
ISO 100

I shot sourdough bread for the baked goods assignment for commercial illustration class. I was pretty happy with it. The lighting & color turned out nicely. I think the styling of it turned out well also, but as we discussed in critique, the garnishes don't really seem to go well enough with the subject. Probably should have picked some other foods that went better. Oh well... still think they look pretty together...

Taste of Asia

images shot with Canon 20D
Alien Bees & softbox
ISO 100

For my first self-promo assignment in commercial illustration class I decided to do a shoot of Asian food. I think that it can be very elegant if done well & kept simple. It was a fun assignment to do - my first real experiment with food photography. Think it turned out pretty well.

GE Fan

image shot with Sinar F1 on Kodak E-100G transparency film
Speedotron strobe pack & Farrell light
ISO 100

This antique fan by General Electric still stands in all it's retro glory after all these years - a great subject for a large format tabletop assignment last semester. My dad bought this fan years ago, and ever since I got into photography I've wanted to shoot a really great shot of it. Needless to say, I was glad to get an assignment that would let me make good use of it.

The fan was lit with a farrell light & some carefully placed white cards so as not to blow out the gold emblem or any of the fan blades. Turns out no matter how I turned the light, one of the fan blades always managed to catch much more light than the others. I tried many combinations of placing cards to block some of the light until I got it looking just right. It was somewhat of a painstaking task, but I was very pleased with the result.