Over the past couple months I have been getting into the world of fashion photography. It has been quite fun and a great learning experience working with other photographer, professional models, makeup artists and more. Through the help of meetup.com i have gone to many group shoots and I am really enjoying this aspect of photography. It is just fun.

So, what am I here to talk about today? The power of post production when you shoot in RAW. I shoot RAW all the time, even on my little Canon S100 P&S camera.  Actually, every image you take with a digital camera is taken in RAW, but if you select a format other than RAW (JPEG, TIFF, etc), the camera uses it’s little processor and built in presets to generate a processed image.  All a RAW file contains is all the data the imaging sensor collects when it is exposed.  It is a lot of information, but if you are going to do any editing of your photos, you want to start with as much information as you possibly can.  Technically, a RAW file isn’t even an image, it just contains a small JPEG reference image for display on your camera’s LCD screen.  All RAW images need to be processed in a computer, using software designed specifically for that.  The software for processing RAW images on your computer is far more sophisticated than the processing your camera can apply, so if you are willing to do the work, you can get much better results.

Check out this example below:

Model: Kasandra
MUA: Shanna Racquel
Hair: Kasandra
Photographer: Alex Weisman

Model: Kasandra
MUA: Shanna Racquel
Hair: Kasandra
Photographer: Alex Weisman

The image on the left is what comes right out of the camera.  You can see that it is very flat, kinda dark, and many people would throw it away as an unusable image. However, when you work with RAR images you have a lot of latitude to fix issues.  I first tweaked the RAW Fine Tuning in Aperture which yields a passable image. From there I moved on to some of my other editing plugins. One of my favorite pieces of editing software right now is the Nik Software suite. Now owned by Google, they have some really great plugins that are very easy to use.

So, before you start tossing out images, think about what you really can do with them.  I have a handful of images I shot with Kasandra which tend to look a little flat and underexposed. I should be able to work with a bunch of them to make some beautiful shots.

Some magicians never reveal their secrets, but for the impressive scene shift that we execute in Pioneer Theatre Company’s production of Clybourne Park, we decided to show it off.  So, as both a technician and the staff photographer I kind of had my hands in the whole process and now have a cool time-laps video to share.

For those who don’t know the show, Clybourne Park, by Bruce Norris, was written as a response/”sequel” to Lorraine Hansburry’s classic: A Raisin in the Sun.  Clybourne Park picks up the story in 1959 in the home that the Younger family is purchasing. Actually only moments after the ending of A Raisin in the Sun.  The first act of the play deals with the family moving out of the house and the community reaction to the fact that a black family will be moving in.

In the second act, we skip forward to 2009. The neighborhood has become primarily black and a white family is moving in.  They plan to demolish the house and build a new one since the cost is almost the same as renovation.  They run into issues with the community when their designs call for a house that is 15 feet taller than the old house.  Let’s just say that things go downhill from there.

So, in the scene shift from Act I to Act II we have a house that has to age 50 years.  It goes from clean and new to run down, vandalized, and falling apart.  If you go to see the show you won’t see the shift as it happens behind a curtain (for theatrical effect), but we are bringing it to the light so that people understand what goes into it.  The scene shift takes a static box set, and in 12 minutes, the crew manages to age it 50 years.  Through some tricks of film and photography we are able to compress that down even more, into a 2 minute video clip.

I set the video to three different pieces of music, if you want to see the others, they are on my website. I would love to know which one people prefer!

Enjoy the theatre magic!

As we near opening for our next show at the theatre I usually find myself with more free time, though I think that this time around my time will be taken up by getting ready for my honeymoon.  This mainly will involve cleaning the apartment and packing.  I am really looking forward to this trip.  It is the first real vacation that Ruth and I will be taking alone together.  It Should be really fun and I am sure it will feel like it was too short.

We also basically just got back from our trip to Disneyland with Ruth’s family.  That was a lot of fun, and it has been quite a while since I have been to Disney.  Ruth and I flew out and met the family there to spend outs first day at Knott’s Berry Farm.  Smaller than Disney with big rides, but also way bigger lines.  We stood in some pretty long lines to ride the rides.  We actually took to calculating how many people the rides could move in the amount of time we waited in line.  We actually waited around 3 hours for one roller coaster that was about a 20-second ride.

After Knott’s, we headed to Co Co Ichibanya (aka Co Co’s), a curry house that is starting to make a US presence, coming from Japan.  Co Co’s was the Jones’ favorite curry house in Okinawa, so they will go out of their way to go there when they can.  I don’t have anything to compare to, but it is darn good food!

Then it was on to Disneyland where we had two days in the parks including staying till about 1:45AM on New Years.  Disney is a lot of fun even when it is wall to wall people. It is the place where everyone has fun, and if you take a moment to plan your day, you don’t have to spend forever waiting in lines.  We managed to break the Pinocchio ride, as soon as we got in the car, bells started ringing and lights started flashing and they had to evacuate the ride.  Then the fog rolled in so thick you could barely see 100 feet in front of you.  We couldn’t see the New Years fireworks, but we did managed to get stuck in the crowd.  We got to fight against the press and then this great little old lady helped us jump the ropes when the cast members weren’t looking so we could get out of the crowd.  Good times were had by all.

Sunset lights up Balanced Rock at Arches National Park

Of course the other big thing is my photo gallery opening that was last week.  For the month of January I have a display of Utah Landscape photography up at the JCC here in Salt Lake.  It was very exciting to lay out all the prints and see them big and up on the wall.  I don’t have the space to really look at more than one at a time at home.  The opening reception seemed to go very well, there was a good turn out and I have since received a few emails asking about the images.  If you are in the SLC area you should stop by and see the prints, otherwise you can see the images on my website.

Ok folks, it has been quite the long stint since I last posted here.  Every blogger says it on a regular basis, but life has just been totally crazy.  My last post was in May, before I went to camp, before I got married, and before the current season at the theatre.  It was almost before the summer really started and now winter is starting.  I have been kind of bad about lots of things in the digital world of communication though.  I have been very slow at responding to emails, I have been behind on processing and sorting photos, and apparantly I am behind on getting videos together from the summer to go online.  Then there are the actual things that I havent been doing, like going to the gym.  Great.

So, will this just be a feeble attempt to try to get things moving on the blog again? I have no idea, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

So, if you got through that first paragraph and didn’t have a “wait, what?!” moment, you probably either already knew that I got married this summer, or you just missed that part.  Yes, since August 25 I have been happily married to Ruth and life is pretty good.  The wedding was beautiful, and everything seemd to go smoothly despite being out of the state at camp for the two months leading up to it.  We held the ceremony and reception at the Alta Lodge and we were happy to celebrate with friends and family.  Good times were definately had by all.  The weather was beautiful, the montains were beautiful, and the over atmosphere was great.  With a ceremony that we wrote ourselves, we were married by a mutual friend in one of the most beautiful places I can think of.  Don’t believe me? Here, see for yourself:

Here we are standing under the canopy that was built by Ruth's father, with our friend Warren officiating our wedding.

Working backwards in time from the wedding, the summer at camp was not one of the best.  Maybe that is why I refrained from writing during it.  I don’t know that I will say too much, though there is plenty to say about it.  The camps were under new ownership as of this past summer, and for some that transition was not so easy.  Suffice it to say, I saw some good friends mistreated in a very public manner and it got dragged out for the better part of the summer.  While I managed to spend the summer flying under the radar, there were grumblings about me as well.  Camp can be strange like that, it is just unfortunate and really hard when friends get hurt.

So let’s not dwell on the ugly past.  The theatre season is in full swing so life has been very busy.  Getting Annie up and open was a killer, but now there is a little room to breathe.  So in the mean time I have been prepping a bunch of my photos for my first ever gallery display!  I will be showing photos at the JCC in SLC for the month of January.  This is pretty darn exciting.  I have the prints on order and should get them soon and I am really excited to see them.  I am having all the prints done on metal with float mounts.  The test prints I had made earlier look amazing, it is a really cool finished product.  It would be hard to show what the prints look like in a photo, so any of you who find yourself in the Salt Lake area during January should stop by and see the gallery!

With that, I think that I need to stop staring at this computer screen. I have spent a lot of time in front of it in the past couple days. Besides being warm in bed sound much nicer!

I almost missed this one even though I was thinking about it last night.  That is what I get for thinking about it and not actually acting on it!  Stuff like that happens to me all the time!

This week’s photo is from a new set of experiments in IR photography.  I talked about how digital IR photo worked in a previous Foto Friday post.  Well, being back at camp for the summer means that I have access to an IR camera for the summer again, so I will be doing more experimenting!

The Home Acres Farm on Rt. 113 in Stow, ME (or close to Stow)

This image was captured a little before sunset during “golden hour” before going out moosing.  I inverted the red and blue channels to make the sky blue and get the cool IR effect in the trees.  The clouds came out pretty cool as well.  Shooting in IR is very interesting and I feel like it really opens up a completely different world of creative imaging.  It is so interesting to be able to visualize that which we can’t see!

I have a bunch more IR photos already and I plan to get them up on my website, IceWolf Photography, this weekend.  They are fun to look it in a bigger scale than this one.  I just need to sit down and do the upload.  I will let you know when that happens.

For now, enjoy this one, and as always, comments, questions, and critiques are always welcome!