Composite Images To Feed Your Photographic Soul

Hello, and welcome to another post.  Recently, like I've discussed before, I've really started to move away from just taking pictures of pretty girls.  I mean taking pictures of beautiful women are great, but it starts to become very boring after awhile. It starts to feel as if my photographic soul is being sucked out of me one beautiful model at a time.  After the initial Strobist years it just all started to feel like the same thing. Let's also not forget about the constant ups and downs when trying to obtain a model from model mayhem.  You can literally spend a work week trying to get in touch with a model, then setup a shoot.  After that, you will more then likely have to contend with trying to get wardrobe, makeup etc. The list goes on and on.  I still enjoy it, but creatively my soul is somewhere else.

In searching to see what got me excited again, I started looking at works by Brooke Shaden, Joel Grimes and other conceptual & composite image photographers.  But the true moment of clarity came when I stumbled upon Phlearn.  Phlearn and the teachings of Aaron Nace were like a breath of fresh air.  He's teaching style and all in one format was great.  His tutorials and images quickly inspired.  I knew that if I took sometime to learn some of what he was teaching, I would have a new outlet to express my photography.  Did I mention just a few years back when I was learning skin retouching I promised myself that was hard enough and I would stop there.  However, thankfully Aaron brings a level headed well balanced teaching approach that makes Photoshop seem rather approachable and even easy at some junctures.  After watching Aaron do his Photoshop thing, it also lead me to seek out other photo manipulators.  This search also led me to the work of the very talented Calvin Hollywood and Glyn Dewis.  These guys are like the special forces when it comes to creating surreal photo composite images.


Recently I have been faced with some down days in my life.  I'm not the type of person to call a meeting and have a crying, hand holding and hugging session.  But like all people we need to find a way to express ourselves. I found solace in starting a project52.  With my project 52 I will take one photo a week for one year.  At the same time that I started this project 52 I also picked up Glyn Dewis new book The Photoshop Work Book.   This book is filled with some of Glyn's awesome images. All of the included images are broken down in detail from start to finish.  Glyn also has several companion videos on his youtube channel.  Armed with these newly acquired Photoshop tools, and the pain I was carrying around, it was time to put pen to paper.


I've studied and played around with many of the Phlearn tutorials, maybe even worked a few of them all the way out from start to finish, but never whole hardheartedly worked on bringing one of my own visions to life.

With so much pain of loss and despair going around in my head I wanted to convey this in my image.  I came across a photographer Michael Herb Michael Herb Photography  on Flickr. He had an image in my eyes that captured everything I was feeling at that time.  Michael Herb is a super talented photographer who has more talent in his Wacom stylus than I have in my entire body.  He seems to be a really cool guy.  I wrote him and explained how his image encouraged and inspired me, and he showed nothing but love in his response.

To start my first full composite image I would need to take an image that captured the emotions Rumbling around in my head.  So with no Model Mayhem, I settled on the only model who could really capture what I was feeling, myself.

This is the raw image that I would use to create my photo which is very similar to Michael's without being the same exact image.  My girlfriend to my camera left, is the best model in the world.  She's always on time knows exactly where to stand and doesn't go crazy if I don't have images ready for her in 2 days time.

Next I would need to remove my self from the background.  If you have access to any of Scott Kelbly's books he has a great short and simple video which really made me think differently about the pen tool.  Aaron Nace gives several explanations of the pen tool and how to use it, but seeing the short  Scott Kelby video really made me think about using it.  The tool is scary and foreign at first, but once you get the hang out it, you will probably want to use it for most  cutouts.

With the look and feel I had to also find a matching suitable background.  That also was made possible via Michael Herb.  Please checkout his companion website layerJunkie  for all of your composite image needs.  He has a good selection of sky images, fire, backgrounds and textures.  This dark ominous sky fit my current situation to the letter, and after seeing his image knew that I needed the same or similar background.

Next was to add myself  to this sky scene.  Which from this first picture that the lighting on me totally does not match this dark and dreary backdrop. I'm still very new at this but playing around with some hue/saturation & levels adjustments did the trick

 Even with the hue and saturation levels adjusted.  This picture still needed something else.  Unfortunately Michael Herb didn't have rain brushes on his site, but I was able to find some on Deviant art. However, most of these brushes still just did not give me what I wanted, so I was forced to search and learn how to create my own rain brush.   I believe that while creating these types of images learning one thing leads to another and so on.  This actually adds to the excitement of creating these images. It also keeps you in a constant state of learning and discovery.   With a few more nips and tucks the image was complete.  My first full composite was complete.  I cannot take credit and say that the conception was mine, but the feeling and emotion behind the shoot was.  As most photographers we tend to imitate, assimilate and hopefully we can move on to the innovation stage.  I myself have a project in mind which is a wicked mixture of both.

During this project I've learned that personal work will often be the work that moves people.  I've been on Flickr for well over 6 years.  In that time I believe the most views I have ever got on the life of a picture may have been a thousand.  Those pictures are all mostly pictures of lovely young ladies in typical beauty situations.  This self image born of emotion an creative emptiness made Flickr explorer with well over 5000 views in one day.  So, when your favorite photographer tells you that you should always try to fit time in or work on personal  projects you really should. You never know what or where working on what really drives you and gets your fire burning will take you. Please keep shooting, learning and growing

Link to Full Size Image on Flickr: Weathering The Storm 

D800 -Review Part-1

Hello all, its been quite a while since my last blog.  I have purchased the d800 since then and have spent some quality time with it.  Man, first off I'd like to start off by saying this camera is not for everyone.  First off if this is your first blog post of mine that your reading or have happened to stumble upon, I mostly shoot people/portrait photography.  What does that mean as far as the d800 is concerned?  A crap load of detail.  Which is great if your a retoucher or love seeing every little flaw and pore in the skin of your subject.  This took my by quite a surprise when using the camera for my first shoot.  I was amazed at how far I could zoom in  while in Lightroom and Photoshop and still see pure skin before hitting the pixel level grid, and even at the grid level in some instances I'm still able to make out skin.  This is great when dabbling with dodging and burning when I pretend to be a professional retoucher.  If you shoot landscapes or architectural photography I believe this camera is for you hands down.  If your a run and gun type of portrait photographer this camera is probably not for you, but if your  a self proclaimed  n,a,s head like myself, you know that you probably really really, don't need this camera but you'll find an excuse to get it. I would suggest at this point looking into a used d3s, d700, or the new d600.

Down side

The downside so far has been the upside, which would be the extreme level of detail.  Hey, looking back at my d700 there were times when I could get away with doing little to know retouching on a model, but the d800 will not work that way.  In person, in front of me the model looked fabulous; however, the extreme amount of detail in the file proved to be my undoing.  I believed we unmasked flaws and pores she didn't even know she had.  This camera if you so dare to step up to the challenge will call upon you to up your post processing skills to take full advantage of the files and to make your clients happy.  I plan on doing some d700 to d800 comparisons as time and subjects allow to show some visual representation of what I'm discussing.  But at this point one shoot is not enough to give anything more than a general opinion on the camera.  I will need to do a lot more work and report back to you guys/gals.

Disk Space

  This section will be short and sweet.  on my first shoot out I was happy as a pig in a blanket to finally have a dual card camera, coming from the single slot d700. However, that quickly changed when I filled up my 8gb sd card(setup to capture jpegs)  and only had a gig left on on 8gb cf-card   ( setup to shoot raw).  I believe I had almost 14 gigs after the shoot altogether.  My gig is a terabyte but averaging that much a shoot would surely send me to the poor house, or at least have me appear on an episode of storage disk hoarders.  So you will most definitely want to slow down when shooting and chose carefully the images you take and plan on keeping.

Vertical Grip

After much debate about spending an obscene amount of money on a grip, I went with a third party option.  So far the grip seems ok. (Flash Point D12 Magnesium Grip )  The grip can be purchased from the link above.  I am in no way associated with Adorama, just thought posting the link could be helpful.  So, the grip actually feels great.  Like I've heard others say besides the softness of I believe the af button or the back focus button and the clickly sound of the main and sub command dials I really don't notice much of a difference between this grip and my nikon-made d700 grip. 

Well, that's it for now  But I hope to drop updates in the coming months on my photo shoots and adventures with this camera.  So please like always whatever camera you shoot please keep on shooting and learning.  I'll leave off with a few pics that I've captured so far. 

Prepping for an upgrade: Building a Computer to run D800 or D600

Hello all, its been  sometime since my last post.  At this time I think its time to upgrade from my d700 and take a look at something new.  I've had my eye on the D800, but the D600 although, a step in the wrong direction, looks very enticing.  My Laptop probably has a few months on my camera or the other way around.  The i5 is still nice and speedy, but hard drive and 4gigs of ram won't cut it for these beast machines.  I played with a raw or 2 in photoshop cs5 which actually worked better than expected, but like I said playing around.  Had I started adding layers and tons of manip my laptop may have tried to give up the ghost.  Also, I do 90% of my work in Lightroom which means one way or another its time for an upgrade. 

 What I've decided is that building my own machine is the way to go, hopefully not a very expensive learning lesson.  I've decided to forgo giving dell my hard earned dollars this time around and give it a shot myself.  Funny thing is I've scoured the Internet looking for help building a computer geared toward portrait photographers/photographers/photoshop and surprisingly didn't find to much.  So, with that said I hope to make this a journey that people in the same boat as me will be able to hopefully find some useful advice and helpful info.  I did however find one very good blog which I not sure how active the blogger is anymore, but with some great build info which got me started.  I most def  check out his site great pics and great advice. you can find the site here Great photoshop Cs6 computer build.

 Again, I hope my build goes will and I plan on blogging about the experience hopefully when I decided d800 or d600 to post some vids on the build to supply further help. Thats all for now please keep shooting.