An awesome shoot with awesome dancers

Hey guys,

A couple of weeks back I was lucky enough to work with Toney Wilson and his crew on his latest project. It was taking place in a nice intimate theater in Venice Beach.

I got hired to shoot the entire day while another person was here shooting the video reel.

I was simply surrounded by talent and it felt great. Beautiful dancers, amazing choreographies and beautiful lights made for great shots, here are my favorites from that day.

As usual click on the pictures to see them bigger.

I am really loving shooting dancers more and more, there's just something about capturing action as it happens. No posing involved just being ready and grabbing incredible moves I could never dream of doing!

Jeremy

First trials with night sky photography

Hey there,

Hard to be back at work after a long 4th of July week, that's the least to say.

But the cool thing is hat this prolonged week end gave me time to go camping in Los Padres National Park with friends for a few days.  The great thing about this park is that the light pollution is very minimal there, so i got to see some pretty cool stars.

Here are my first tests in night sky photography. (click on them to see them bigger)


I did a bit of lightpaintig with an LED torch for the foreground, one thing i need to be better at is finding the milky way, but it's a start!

Enjoy your week

Jeremy

The best way to take care of devil pet eyes (with photoshop)

Hey guys,

I posted a picture of our little foster dog the other day when she got adopted.

I was in a rush so my wife and I took it with our smartphone and it looked like this

after doing a bit of research on how to fix these diabolic eyes, I found that most tutorials and even the red eye fixing tools simply paint the pupils black and add a catch light with a white paint brush, that would make it look like this:

pet-eye-03.jpg

I thought that it really did not look good and decided to come up with a better way to fix it.

It's actually pretty easy to do, provided you know your way around photoshop a little.

I opened my original photo in PS, then found a picture of dogs eyes on google, I used this one:

I simply searched "dog eyes" on google and found a picture that matched Marble's (that's our dogs name) eyes and furr but you can also simply take a real picture of your dogs eyes without flash to make it work.

I then opened this eyes picture as a layer on top of my original image.

I used the lasso tool to select one eye, used refine edge to add some smoothing and feathering to the selection of the eye.

Then I placed this selection on its own layer by pressing Ctrl+J. After that I positioned, rotated and streched the eye to be on top of the devil eye.

I lowered the opacity of the layer to about 80%.

The final touch to sell the effect is to add a slight blur (1px) to the layer to match the picture below it... et voila!

Now the eyes look much more realistic!

Total time 5 min. So next time you have to fix some crazy devil eyes, think about using othr pictures of nice eyes to lay on top of it.

Jeremy

Creating mood with black and white

Hola amigos,

today I am going to talk about my explorations when post processing photos.

I took this one in Mexico in Monte Alban near Oaxaca. These ruins are really impressive but unfortunately I could not get there under perfect lighting conditions.

Since it was june and this is the rainy season, I got a lot of clouds. It's not necessary a bad thing as I immediatly thought it would look good in black and white.

Now black and white can mean many things, there are a lot of possibilities with it.

Here are 2 of my favorites conversations for this one. (click on the picture to see them bigger)

One is very contrasty, the other one is smoother and a bit moodier.

Converting to black and white is not just about removing color, it gives you the occasion to either go really high contrast or smoother, highlight different areas of the pictures and give an overall different feeling from the original one.

I tend to use Silver Efex Pro from Google to convert to black and white as it gives me a good starting point with their very good presets.

Which one do you like best? moody or contrasty? or color maybe?

Let me know in the comments, it's always good to see people's opinion.

Jeremy