Creative Saturday in the Studio

Every week I try and do SOMETHING creative. Sometimes, its not much more than getting out of the studio for a photo walk around the Crossroads. Yesterday, I took creativity by the horns and told myself “Im just gonna shoot!”

I had been stewing over the idea of shooting some beverages for a long time. I wanted something that looked clean and crisp, but still had that “alive” feeling to it. After looking through some images of my photo heroes including Martin Wannocott, who is the quintesential beverage master, I was truly inspired, but figured today I’ll just try for something “simple”. Of course, those of you who have ever tried to shoot beverages, know that is an oxymoron… simple is just not in the cards, baby.

Glass of Perrier with lime wedge.

Nonetheless, I set up my tripod Canon 5d for the shoot. Starting in the kitchen where we have WONDERFUL natural wrap around lite, I thought this was going to be ideal for the look I wanted. The only difficult thing was going to be freezing the fizz from the sparkling Perrier. That would probably take some strobes. I tried a few quick test shots, but it wasnt working so I moved everything back into the studio and setup my strobes in a split lighting setup. Key light was camera right just off to the side of the subject and second light was back left to give the subject some shape. I added a gelled backlight for some added color, but wound up not really using it much after I got going.

It took about 30 min before my creative juices started flowing. Since I was shooting tethered into Lightroom, I could view my images right out of the camera on my 20″ monitor….which really is schaweeeeet. That’s really the only way to shoot in studio. After getting several overall shots, I got a little more creative and started drilling down into the details of the setup and found myself really interested in capturing the bubbles floating up from the bottom of the glass. I eventually worked my way into some more abstract type images, which it seems I tend to gravitate towards. With a background in graphic design, a lot of my images have a graphic feel to them.

Ramekin of lime and lemon wedges on white background.

Before I realized it, I had spent about 2 hours in the studio setting up, getting some test frames, adjusting the lights and subjects, and in the end, I got about 100 images that I then edited down to about 25 that I really liked. From there, I tightened down that edit even further to about 8 that really showed some variance and that I felt represented the work I had done. I spent another 20 minutes doing some global tweaks in Lightroom, then uploaded the top images to my image archive on Photoshelter. After uploading, I added my commercial stock pricing licenses and sent them on to my public gallery. I finished the task by Tweeting and posting to my Facebook fanpage the final results so all my followers could see how I had spent my Saturday afternoon. Below is the gallery of images from yesterday’s shoot.

Lots of fun, and once you get a workflow down, it makes it a LOT easier. Photoshelter has really been a workflow boost and has cut hours off my time by allowing me to Tweet and Facebook my galleries right from my account dashboard. The extra nice thing about using Photoshelter is that I can post images from my account right from within my blog. If your a photographer, you at least need to check it out and see if Photoshelter works for you. Great stuff.

Hopefully, today’s post gives you all a glimpse into my creative workflow. I’ll try to share more about my processes in upcoming posts. In the meantime, if you have specific questions about the creative process, my workflow, or anything else that may have peaked your interest, post a response and I’ll do my best to give you an answer. If you have ideas for future topics, or would like to see something specific, feel free to respond as well.

Cheers!
-Chad

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Creative Articles, Photography Portfolios. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.