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Image Compositing

We're going to talk about compositing, but really the heart of what I do is storytelling, so you're really not going to hear me talking about compositing in a super technical way very often because it all comes back to the story. So if you're not telling the story than I don't really see a reason for compositing now, it's just me personally that's not everybody else, so there are very practical reasons why you would composite image and I'm going to be showing some of that, you know, things that you just might have to remove from a picture, things that aren't quite working, you can't get everything on set, whatever it may be compositing is super important, but for me, if there's no story than I don't see really any reason and going forward compositing, so we're going to tie the two together a lot, going to be showing a lot of before and after images tried to illustrate for you some of the different ways that I've used compositing show you some behind the scenes staff photo shop how, too...

, so I'll give you some really solid tips on how to do a composite image on dh then just my work flow a little bit telling you how I go about creating that image. So story let's talk it's all about the what the how and the why it's really obvious when I put it like that, you know, obviously story is about what happened and why it happened and how it happened. Well, we don't really think of it like that in such simple terms very often and it's easy to think of that when you're reading a book you know there are their conventions to reading and understanding literature that everybody knows but it doesn't really apply as much in the photography world at least for almost people for me it's the kind of thing that I think about constantly so what are you going to shoot it's the what it's? The obvious thing that you know who are you going to put, where that's the what and then there's the how are you going to shoot it? So how are you actually going to put this together? Super important aa lot of people forget to consider that beforehand and then you end up really frustrated later because you didn't think about how it was that we're going to come together and then there's the why? So what is making you put this together and that's the most important one to me now it's all about shooting with intent and I'm going to say this over and over and over intent intent intent if you are not shooting with intent then you can't really expect the viewer to understand your picture, so what I mean is this now intent doesn't mean story necessarily it doesn't mean that you have to have a really literal story of a girl going to the grocery store coming home, spilling her milk and then being really upset about it. So you take a picture of her crying in the corner, you know, that's not what I mean by shooting with intent. What I mean is maybe you're photographing a blade of grass because you happen to really like blades of grass or something, and so you could take a picture of that blade of grass just sort of, you know, I'm standing up click there's, there's, some grass, I took a picture, you could think about it more, though why are you shooting that blade of grass? Maybe it looks amazing in the sunlight, so you take another light and you sort of highlight the edge of it and get in really close to use a special lens you're making all of these specific choices because you know why you're shooting that blade of grass? If you know why it's going to turn out most likely a better picture and then other people are going to know why you did it as well it's going to look intentional, so that's what I'm trying tio get across to you guys is shooting with intent not necessarily with a huge story but intent it's so important so I want to talk a little bit about this image first and the story around it so the story we have the what a girl in a flooded room it's just the obvious it's what is actually happening in the picture and then we have the how so how was I going to put this picture together? I struggled with this for awhile wondering should I try toe composite water into a room and how would I make that look realistic and things of that nature instead of doing that I thought I'm just going to go on an adventure and I'm going to take these walls to the ocean and do it that way so that's what I did I had some walls built and I took them in a big u haul truck down to the ocean it was about six a m they were really heavy and I was told that I could sort of nail them together to create that corner of the wall well it didn't really work probably because of me partially kes I don't really know howto work a hammer and stuff like that so I was trying to hammer and now it all together and the second that we put it in the ocean it broken half so it didn't work the walls collapse to wind it up kind of bloody after that are we got all toran up by the wood wood walls and everything and but I was able to stick around long enough to get this shot and I actually had to do it with one wall instead of two instead of using the corner cut the other one was split in half instantly so I shot with one wall and then I took another picture of the wall on the other side so that I could add them together to create that wall intersection so compositing came in handy here even though I thought I'm going to be clever and I'm going to do it all you know on location and it's going to be great and that didn't really work out the other problem was that we had bright sunlight it took us so long to get this start going that the light was just flooding the ocean so I had to use the wall itself to block the light and then use the shadowy portions of the ocean that I captured to put it all together into this image and then there's the why so to show a feeling of entrapment we all know that feeling of feeling like you can't escape from your situation I wanted to show this flooded room myself this is a self portrait trying to get out of that room and how I would go about doing that so everybody feels overwhelmed like they're drowning and that is exactly what this picture was about. So technique I'm gonna go back to the story part of this absolutely in a little bit, but I want to switch over to technique and how you actually create a composite image, so shooting a blank shot or a plate now plate is the technical term, and I tend to simplify things into what I could understand. So I say blank shot and that's just my fancy way of saying that I'm taking the model out of the picture and taking a shot of just the background so you could call it the background shot, the blank shot, whatever you want, this is something that is not absolutely necessary for every single picture that you take, but it can never hurt. So I always shoot it and I'm going to show you exactly what I mean by this and all these other points in just a second use a tripod most people are anti tripod, even there, there are some, like chronic people who they just have to go go go hand held all the time and that's what they do, I say, ok, use the tripod and they put their camera on the tripod and then I say, okay, now shoot and they picked their whole tripod up and then shoot handheld, okay, so we're not doing that today so try to keep it on the tripod. If you're shooting on a tripod on dh, the reason for this is that it won't shift your your frame is going to stay the same, and I'll show you another example of that in just a second to all right, so use consistent lighting, camera angle this is going to be extremely important in doing a compartment composited image if you don't have that consistency, you're going to have a problem, so we're going to be talking about that as well, and I'll show you some examples make the image believable. This is the one sort of not concrete term that I have here, but it is so important if you don't have a believable picture. Well, then there's really no point in creating it if you're making it to show other people. So if you're showing the image and somebody thinks that it's just not believable at all, then you haven't done your job and creating a cohesive, believable scene. Lock your focus now this one's really funny on dh it really messes people up because what I do is I shoot auto focus, I can't manually focus to save my life, but I shoot auto focus, focus on the subject this relates back to that blank shot that I'm talking about getting the model to move out. So if you're taking your pictures have got it on auto focus your shooting and then all of a sudden the model moves and you're getting your blank shot. Well, what's gonna happen to your folks? Yes, it's just going to shift to the background, wherever that is, you're going to start all over again, so I flipped down to manual focus. I do that when I'm shooting the model, so once I have the model and focus flipped emmanuel and then I can continue shooting and not worry about my focus shifting so the plate or the blank shot for the background image or whatever you wanna call it let's talk about that. So this is when you take the subject out of the frame, so I have my camera setup. I'm shooting an image and once I've got my shots, I have, you know, whatever has to be photographed maybe there's fabric moving and a girl standing in the picture once I have all those pictures that's when I say okay, thank you. Can you step aside? She steps aside and then without moving my camera without changing my settings, I just click my shutter that's it you have a blank shot, and that way you can get things out of the picture if you need to remove them so let's say that you didn't realize that your buddy was standing in the background just kind of like slightly and frame a little bit there there the whole time and oh my gosh what am I going to do well you have a blank shot so you can just erase them right out of the picture because when you do that the background shows through and I'll be showing this more practically in just a moment I'm going out there so it can't hurt to take a plate but it can't hurt to not take one and this is what I was talking about if you don't have that shot you might be just fine you might be able to clone things out you know there are ways of getting around it but it is so helpful tohave so try to remember to take that shot so it allows you to easily edit things out of the picture and that's our goal is easy editing I mean I'm not trying to spend hours and photo shop I want to get things done as quickly as possible especially compositing where that sort of technical you know you have to do it there has to be a certain process that you go through I want to get to the fun part of editing which is the colors and the contrast in light and things like that so I'm trying to get out of the compositing phase as fast as possible this is an example of that here I am standing in the picture I don't want myself in this picture so what did I do? I took a picture of the model I went back to my camera locked down my focus so I was on manual had her step aside and then I took this picture so you see it all comes together just like this I am not in the picture anymore because I just erased myself out of it so the way that it works in photoshopped which I will also show you later is that you have your layers palette so this is your layers palette right now and you have the background layer as your first layer which is the blank shot the plate then you have the subject on top so when you raced the subject off of this layer the background shows through it's really simple it's really easy to dio and you will find that when you're creating your images you will be finished compositing within minutes because it's really not a difficult process of a racing something out of a picture so let's talk a little bit more about focus so we don't want your focal point to shift and this could be an issue for some people because a lot of people you know have them also move here and then here and then here and you don't know when you're going to get that shot so what I try to do is figure it out first so you're not doing that this whole thing of the model moving, dancing to the music whatever you have going on in your photo shoot you try a few different things and once you see the pose that you like that once you have her doing this you're taking your shots, then you show her the picture and you say okay, you remember this picture that we did let's go back into that pose and then you can get her just one shot in that pose, lock your focus there and then take your blank shot so that way you can still shoot in your normal style of figuring out what works for you, but then you go back to that shot that worked and do it again. So flip your lens to manual focus now this could be taken care of by back focusing, so I don't personally use back focusing but it's basically a quick solution to this problem because your focal point it's not going to change when you click your shutter. So if you are using the normal mode of focusing, then you can focus your camera, get down you're good to go using a tripod like we talked about some composited shots can be done without a tripod ah lot of them can be and we might even do some of that today but all composite shots can be done with the tripod, so it can't hurt to use a tripod. Do you guys use tripods? Sometimes I see some. No. Yeah. So all right, not many people use a tripod. That's what I have found, I just taught a class with eighty people in it. And only one person even had a tripod with, um it was really something to see everybody trying to use that one tripod. But I carry my tripod with me everywhere except for here, of course, because I'm a slacker and I didn't bring it with me. So we have another tripod. But I tried to bring it anywhere I go. And another fun thing is that if I have two tripods, I use that to focus on when I do self portrait. So I get asked that a lot. How do you do your self portrait ce? And so I'll just take my second tripod, put it in place and focus on that. All right? So the tripod is just making sure that nothing shifts. So this is the same as if you have a camera with the zoom lens and you're zooming that's equally as bad is moving your tripod, so do we have any chronic sumers in here? No, you're good I use only prime lenses so it's something that I don't really think about too often so for me it's just you know I have to move my tripod if I want to move my camera if I want to change my frame but a lot of people are used to zooming you have the zoom lens on your camera so if that gets bumped while you're shooting a composite image if something like that happens that can be really bad for the overall picture so try to just set everything and leave it alone it's a really hard discipline to get into sometimes is not changing things as you're going but it can be done consistency this is the most important one making sure the light on the camera angle are the same so let's say you want to composite a bird into your picture and the light is hitting that bird from this side but then the light is hitting your model from this side and you put those two together it's not gonna make any sense whatsoever we're trying to avoid that we want to make sure that everything makes him in the picture and it's not just where the whites coming from it's the quality of light you know is it diffused light is it harsh light is that yellow is it blew what is the light like and how much can you change that later so how diffuse how harsh head of myself, um, just think about where everything falls in the frame, you know, maybe the light in your main picture is coming from up here, it's a son it's coming diagonally and make sure that everything is being hit from that same angle and that's why I shoot everything on location, so I am never going out. I'm never going out and shooting, you know, in a studio for part of it, and then awful location for another part, unless I have to, and by having to I mean, I can't get a prop in my car or something just happened, and I absolutely can't do it. And in that case, I make sure the lighting's exactly the same, um, one image that I will show you later with the boat in the air, like we talked about that image, I had to shoot that boat against a white background because I knew that I'd be putting it in the sky later, which was a white sky, so I'll show you that in just a bit. So shooting on location locked down, it creates less room for error. So when I say shooting locked down, I just mean with your focus and your tripod, everything is locked on your camera that doesn't mean that your settings have to stay exactly the same I don't care if you make it a little bit brighter a little bit darker from one to the other because we will be changing that leader so believability if your picture doesn't make sense then you can't expect anybody to understand it right? And I get asked this a lot how do you make a picture believable and it's all about figuring out what elements are happening in your image and making sure they flow? So I'll show you this in just a sec um stay true to the world that you're creating I get yelled about yelled at about this all the time because my husband is a stickler for like, you know, you have to make sure that it makes sense and then I'll say things like that it's a make believe world so anything's possible and that's not a good excuse I find you know, so so in my world you know the white still has to be coming from the right direction. It just has to be earl's everybody's going to see it as a mistake because even though I'm creating images that can actually happen in real life, we're reading them from the perspective of real life so if they don't make sense it's not going to be a successful picture yeah, I'm brooke what do yu okay so all your light has to come from the same source. So what did you say? Like, you're not going to go out and shoot a person in the ocean and then you want a bird. So are you gonna wait there and said, you know, until you know, so okay, so what? How do you do that? Because you're not shooting at the same time, the same race, same. So when you said all light has to be the same source, I would say, it just has to be the same type of light, not the same source, same direction, yes, but here's, the good thing about what I shoot is that it's all over cast, you know, it's all diffused light, so the light is almost always from the same direction, so I don't have much of a problem with that. But let's say that you're shooting and you're shooting at sunset, the light's very specific you didn't get any birds in your shop. Well, then I would either go on a stock site, bison, birds with the same quality of light, or I would just I wouldn't wait that day, of course, if they're not coming, but I would just go back and keep checking in and see when you can get birds and figure out when is a good time. When do the birds come there? It sounds really strange, but you know, if you're shooting at the beach, there are certain beaches where the birds are going to flock, teo and, you know, things like that so here's an example of making an image believable. Now when I shot this, I could have left it exactly as it is, but there wasn't really a lot going on in the picture, and I wanted to make it more interesting. One way that I do that is by adding motion, so you'll see me a lot doing a little dressed flips and hair flips and things like that. So to make this picture more interesting, I wanted it to look like there was a breeze coming through the room like there was wind happening, because that made it a little bit more magical, so what I ended up doing was adding on little bits and pieces to create a more interesting and dynamic image so you can see here that we have the dress moving, we have the hair flipping, and all of a sudden it becomes something a little bit more otherworldly. You know, there shouldn't be wind in there, but there is and it's consistent so the dress is moving and the hair is moving and what you see a lot is somebody forgetting to do each of the different parts. You know, if the dress is moving, why isn't the hair moving hair is lighter than address, so I wouldn't it be so I'm going to try to think about all those little components and if I was really thinking about everything, I probably would have gone into foot that tablecloth back there and made that move too just to really create that true sense of movement in this image. Okay, so I just want to point out some questions that I get asked a lot about compositing and try to answer them as best I can. So what equipment do you use during a normal photo shoot? And the answer is this it's very simple a cannon five demark too that's the camera that I have before I had that I had a nikon d eighty and that was what I used from day one until about two years ago I use a fifty millimeter f one point four lens that's pretty much the only ones that I use I use that for absolutely any shot that I can sew the times very camp underwater shooting I have to have a wide angle lens underwater it's just something that I have to do because I'm shooting in murky water, so if I'm not close enough to the subject, I won't be able to see the subject. Another thing that I use it for a shooting from overhead. So if I want to be doing this clicking, taking my shots, I need to make sure that I have a wide enough lens to get everything in the picture and we actually have a wide england's here to use because we are going to be shooting from overhead for a few of these segments. Tripod um, I was joking earlier. I have eight different tripod plates, but no tripods and it's really ridiculous that I have lost the actual tripods and not the plates for them, but I have a little baggie that I just it sits on my desk in case I ever find a tripod, but it's a big problem in my life right now, actually, and then a wireless remote. So that is typically what I have with me on a shoot. I never use lights. You know, I don't use anything fancy or anything like that, and I find that to be really encouraging and it's something that excites me about photography because I don't have to have a lot of stuff with me, you know? I don't have to pack up the reflector and twenty pounds of lights and things like that I could walk out my door but just my backpack, my tripod and then get to a location, shoot it and I'm done in ten minutes that's the other thing about my shooting process is that it takes me a very short amount of time to create a picture because it's all planning, you know, it's all about okay, what am I going to do? How am I going to do it? Why am I going to do it once I have that down the shoots very quick so this is an example I'm just going to take you through the before and after of this image how it was created and I really want to start with a blank wall because we've been talking about that how I shot with a blank wall, I always just use my bedroom walls and this is no different this was my bedroom and I shot this pretty recently in the last six months or so and this is how it started, so this image was just me, you know, on the wall, nothing very fancy and I use this as my main shot, so we talk about the main shot it's very important to me what I consider to be the main shot is the shot that I'm building on top of, so if I have my main picture that's going to be the shot of the model in her pose with everything happening as much as possible, so if I were to set up a shoot right now, maybe I would, you know, be in my post, my pose, I don't know why, so I'm in my pose, and maybe I've got the dress moving like this, you know? And I'm getting everything as much as I can in one shot that way don't add the dress on and then add the hair on. I've got everything in one shot, and then if I need to just tossed my hair a little, I can do that is an extra, so I have the main shots and then the accompanying shots, which are the extra shots. So this is my main shot, I'm in my pose, and then here I am here living all over the place, so you'll see that a few different times and there's nothing special to it. You know, I don't have, like a giant fan or something that blows my hair, and, you know, we thought about doing that here is going to sit here, lounge with the fan in my hair, but decided not to so I don't work with a fan, nothing fancy just moving my head all around and sometimes flipping like that. Nothing fancier than a hand, though. So here again. And now my goal in this was to create sort of a fan effect with my hair. So if I could do that, then I could put it so then it was sort of stuck to the wall all around me. That was my goal. I knew what I wanted the picture look like. So I wasn't just randomly flipping my hair everywhere and hoping something looked cool. It does what? Cool. When you do that, it's just gonna happen. But in this case was very specific. So here we go again. And these are kind of dangerous because I really wanted it to look like it was on the wall. So I was kind of feeling in my head into the wall and really fun and dangerous and painful and very have that again. So this is the before and after. So you can see it's actually not that different. Now I say that obviously there's a lot more hair, but in terms of the whiting and in terms of the colors and things like that, I just made it brighter added contrast. And really there wasn't a lot more to it it was just a matter of enhancing what I got in camera so after compositing sometimes there is a huge overhaul that happens in post sometimes there's not so compositing almost always happens in my pictures I mean even if it's just a little less things where it looks like there should be no compositing involved usually have done something whether it's you know, changing a hand to look a little bit more elegant or something like that question yes when year compositing your images and you're showing in a gallery or somebody's looking at your images do you find that they ask you what's real what's not real what they asked you to dissect it and constantly think how did how do you? Because for me I would just like it's a picture just love it you know like write but how do you react to that? You know I don't get upset about it because it used to get a little frustrating when you're showing out of art fair or something where there are so many people streaming in and everybody just says how'd you do how'd you do it how did you do it and then you kind of just want to say no just figure out why I did it you know and and not the how but then you have to remember that it's it's fun it's a point of curiosity and I like talking about it to a certain extent so you know if somebody asked me I'm never goingto not tell them exactly but you know I always try to change the subject as fast as possible teo you know, do you like it or what do you think about it or what do you notice and things like that but yeah, but it's often a good way to be able to talk to people because I can't talk to people very well in public situations so so I tend teo sort of embrace those questions a little and run with it so do I use repeat locations and we've talked about this the answer is absolutely yes but I try to change it up as much as I can on and I'm doing that by changing the lighting, changing what I have in the shot changing the body movements things like that so you can see I have a chocolate sauce picture down in the corner but then I also have another image that looks different you know? It's obviously not a different space but the quality of light is a little bit different little bit more directional I change the colors added movement and there's a different feeling to it so this is the same location I'm going to show you an image with the same wardrobe lighting and camera angle and you're going to see how they came out a little bit different so the's air to images that I did in the exact same spot I mean literally cameron the same spot me in the same spot everything the same but I tried to create something different out of it so you can see how you no one is very simple very plain there's just hair moving the other one we have this whole garden being created inside the room starts out this one was created I sat on my bed made sure you could see the bed in the shot that way I had a foundation in which I could put the garden in I had my hair moving so you can see this is my main shot I have the hair going I'm in my pose everything is as I want it to be this is the picture that I shot of the garden aspect the outdoors that I came and brought in and what I was very careful to do was to capture it running against the wall that way I had a natural stopping point where it could meet the wall in my picture and then I held these flowers up tio have a little detail of flowers growing out of my hair and then this is a really good example of just a close up shot of what is being changed in post so I don't wear lipstick and actually allergic to it so I stay away from that so I'm changing that photo shop um brightening up my lips brightening up my face making sure that something pops because I am all about little details so if I could get a cz many little details as possible that's going to be great and it's also wonderful for talking points at a gallery show or wherever you're showing it if you can have little details like that that are going to pop off the page then people are going to gravitate towards that and they're going to spend more time looking at your images so how many photos do I take during a normal photo shoot? The answer is as many as I need and no more at all I will not take extra pictures if I don't have tio I don't actually like clicking my camera it's not fun to me so you know I'm not I'm not that person is clicking a hundred times and then saying oh, maybe I got something no I'm taking the exact pictures that I need and then I'm stopping there and the reason is that I'm just impatient I mean there's really nothing more to it I don't want to waste my time shooting a ton of pictures that I'm not going to like I also really hates storting pictures so when I get in on my computer I don't want to have to look at a hundred pictures I just want to know exactly what I need to pull so my typical process it will take a test shot. I'll check the whiting check camera angle, check the pose everything all at once. I'll make my changes take another test shot and then move on to the actual shoot. All right, so this is an example of taking as many pictures as I needed and not a single one more. So for this picture, I was really unsure about how to do it. It was a new thing for me. I didn't know how to put it together, but I came in with a game plan and I knew what pictures I thought I would need. So these are all of those images, so we have the sky. I knew that I was going to need that. I have lots of dangling branches that I could use as the under part of the earth. I have me jumping so that I could get my legs where they aren't stuck straight on the ground. So I just did a nice little jump and use that as the bottom half of my body. We have the main post, which is right underneath that so that's the hair flip and in the pose and that's the upper upper part of my body, I also took a picture of just the dirt so that I could have that nice texture of the earth below. And then we have the scene so that's going to be the background right next to that and then an actual sort of slope of the earth and that way there was sort of a point at which I could cut it off and make everything below the earth look natural so this is that image again you can kind of see how things came together so something's that I'll point out you have the branches that are coming up through the earth and if I go back here that was done with let me just step over here this image right here so if you can see that one that's what ended up I cut those branches out individually had them come up through the earth okay do I have any questions about this image in particular? I just wantto make sure that I don't miss anything about this well just a quick question on like about how long does it take you in post production to create something like this? Okay, good question. So this one was longer than usual. I would say I never spent any less the two hours it's just a rule for myself that I never ever want to spend less in that because then I feel like I'm not doing it justice and I really want to sit with it for a while averages about five to seven hours and this one was probably around the ten hour mark that's not as typical. I'm really pretty much at the five hour mark, usually sometimes up to forty hours. It just depends, but those are very rare that's like that key picture that I showed you with the thousand keys and then my computer crashing. So we had to take into account the fact that it took a full thirty seconds to move the key from one side of the frame to the other six. My computer was so slow. Um but yeah, where all the images of from this shot from the same location, yes, aside from the sky, so let me just put back their real quick s oh, yes, the sky was taken at a different location. I believe that was in germany actually eso quite a ways away, but aside from that, yes, these were all taken in the same spot and it's interesting. You can actually see that there were kind of nice clouds that day in some of these pictures here and I could have used them, but I felt that the image needa little pop of color and some variation in light. So I did at a different sky in you're probably going to get into this later on I'm not sure, but are you going to talk about what technique used to cut out? Definitely yep, absolutely tomorrow editing session part two and then another just quick one from the internet um uh lou most studio is wondering if you intentionally expose for the highlights more so seo no yeah talk about that now yeah absolutely let's talk about it I will almost always exposed for the highlight the reason is that I can get better detail out of the shadows when I can from bringing back highlights most of the time and that's just how I shoot I don't really think there's one way that's better than the other just personal but yes and my images air naturally so dark that I tend to like that and so if I can't see perfect detail in a shadow I usually don't care because I'm pretty much going do that anyways and photoshopped darken it down so yeah that's that's how I tend to shoot thank you okay all right so sometimes the art of post post processing is planning and for me it always is it's not true for everybody you know post processing is different for everybody but for me it's all about knowing what I'm going to shoot and then shooting it so it's funny because a lot of people say well you know photo shop artists they just rely on the tools and photoshopped to create an image not there's anything wrong with that but it's also generally not true you really have to know what images to capture to be able to do something with them so you know, I'm not the kind of person that goes in and shoots lots and lots of images hoping something works and that's not bad either it's just a process, but my process is to know exactly what pictures any to take and then put them into photo shop and sort of build from what I knew I was going to do already and there are always pictures that go wrong there are always things that just don't fit together how I thought they would, but in those cases it's a failure or in other words there's learning from it this is that image that I keep referencing the one where I had to shoot the boat on a different location let me take you through this process a little bit this was how I started creating the image this was my idea I was going to put the model in the water have the waves pounder from behind and then there we go I've got the rope I've got the waves splashing and then immediately after I am pummeled, by the way I felt, um I did shoot underwater so this was actually the underwater shot that I chose and I had her lift her legs up a little bit so that I had her feet dangling also in this picture in separate shots, but I liked how the dress looked alone because I felt like when the dress was so long on her, it looked made her look like a little girl a little bit, so I left it like that. This was my failed underwater shoot. I tried to shoot in the ocean but didn't expect there to be grass everywhere so couldn't do it, so that was the failure. So this was the point at which I realized I couldn't shoot most everything on location I had planned on shooting underwater, above water, everything at the same location. It was nice and easy. I already had my camera in the housing, so when I realized I couldn't, we had to schedule another shoot, and this ended up being a three day shoot. Not that I spent a full three days doing it, but we had to get together three different times, right? So I'm going to take you through some of this process. This is how this image started. This is the main shot that I used. I chose it very specifically, I'm looking for believability and my images, so I had her arm straight up in the air just like this. And I said, just lean into that arm like it's pulling you, so I let her know that she has to dangle her body and keep that arm stick straight. There were other shots that I got of her like you saw before where she was sort of both arms up or sort of not really pulling tight on the rope and I kept saying to her you know you have to make that arm straight because if it's not it's not going to look like it's supporting your body weight so that was something really important teo to get down although to defend her she did have waves pummeling her so it was a little bit difficult so I expanded my frame this is the first time that I'm really speaking about this I'm going to talk about it a little more back in like I don't know I guess the end of two thousand nine I decided to write a block post about expanding the frame and ever since then it's just been something that really defines my work in a way but only if you know it technically so expanding the frame really just taking extra shots all around the image once you do that you can add them together so you might be thinking why would you bother doing that? Why don't you just move the camera back and then crop it in and they're two really good reasons for doing this first one is that you can print larger so if you're adding more pictures into the canvas and making that bigger than you can print the image larger but the other res sin is a depth of field issue, so if I want to get the background out of focus, then I need to be closer to the subject, right? So if you're doing that, then you can get closer to the subject and then take pictures of everything around the frame separate and then add them together. Then it looks like you were standing further back you weren't, but therefore your background is out of focus a little bit more than it would have been. So those air two reasons that I use this technique there's the boat, so I shot that in a separate location. I actually shot that on my patio with some white towels behind it, and that was my white background. So like I was saying, you don't have to have anything fancy, I just use whatever white thing I had that I could stick behind the boat, but I knew that the sky was going to photograph white and I knew that because I always shoot at the same time of day I'm always shooting before the sun has come up or after it's gone down, and that means that there's not a lot of light filling the sky so the sky isn't gonna look blue it's going to look quite so I knew that, and I shot accordingly. Here you can see the top of the boat pop on there, so let's, go back, you can see that pop on. So there it's gone, and then there it is and that's because of my lens, so I couldn't get far enough back with my camera to take that picture. I I also couldn't get the towel up high enough, so to photograph that little top part of the boat, I used my timer and I went behind with the talyn I held it up behind and it was able to capture both parts of the boat so here's my sky that I've added in and that was really important to me. Now if I go back one slide here, you can see that white sky it's really overwhelming that's a lot of white to look at, and that could be really distracting in a picture because our eye is going to go toe what's, lightest in the frame. So if my eyes going to the background instead of the boat and the girl that's a big problem, so I'm adding in the stormy sky makes it a little bit more dynamic, and it makes sense. You know, I wanted to look a little bit stormy like this is a very odd in a scene. So I'm changing colors no colors or some of my favorite things in the world and I'm going to talk in depth about how I color my image is tomorrow, but I love adding color to an image so here you can see I've added onto the bottom part of the frame now and this is the underwater portion, so I had to choose a spot to sort of cut into the wave and then add that bottom portion in and then there is her nightgown being added a cz well, so I took the underwater portion and her nightgown all from that same picture that you saw before where she was just standing in a creek and then expanding the frame a little bit more, finishing my color and then adding some texture so I always add texture as the last thing that I do and we're going to be going over that in depth as well little bit leader, so think first and shoot second it is the best advice that I can give it something that not many people take advantage of the fact that we can actually think about it before we take a picture and I'm not saying it's the best way to shoot by any means everybody has their own style, but if you want to create a composite image it just helps so much able to think about what you're doing before you start doing it all right, so what kind of light do I use? I talk about this a little bit already but I used to fuse light so it's all natural diffuse light almost every time ninety eight percent of the time that's what I'm using so for me that means that I'm getting up really early and I'm going out while it's still dark out getting my everything set up my tripod in everything once the white starts to rise that's when I take a picture and it's not golden hour it's magic hour so magic hour is not actually an hour they're lying when they say that it's like thirty to forty five minutes of good light and that's before you see the sun at all everything is a really neutral gray color just like an overcast day so utilize that light a lot I also shoot once the sun has gone down which a lot easier you don't think it up at five a m but the great thing about getting up early is that you can avoid the park rangers when you're going to parks and shooting illegally so so I try to do that as much as I can especially I'm shooting nudes and it is really funny to say but it is something that people run into a lot where like how do you shoot a nude outsider? How do I have privacy when I'm shooting get up early it works so all natural diffuse light that's what I'm using and I use that for two different reasons I think that it gives it a nice soft fairy tale kind of look to it, but I also really, really love the fact that natural light and diffuse light is easy to manipulate photo shop, so I am changing my lighting dynamics a lot when I'm in editing what I mean by that is that I am taking the light maybe adding a vignette may be changing the direction of the white and you can do that because there is no really clear defined light source in your picture, so over casting cloudy days and in magic hour also window light, we're going to be utilizing that tadeusz well after lunch, so I will be using the window light in this room and I'm going to show you how I would play with that light a little bit to make it work for what I'm trying to do here's an example of lighting where if you can get the subject positioned in the right spot, the lighting is going to be really beautiful as it isthe so I didn't really have to do much to this picture in terms of changing the white I did do a lot to in terms of compositing, though you can see my legs just popped on there and I wanted to create a dress out of curtains I just love the curtains in this room so much and if I could wear curtains every single day, I would and I'm not even kidding you I love curtains anything that has a floral pattern of all about that so I love these curtains and want to make a dress out of it. So I started adding on these little portions of the dress and I did that just by holding it out to the side holding it out photographing it, adding that in later now something like this for your adding fabric on could be a little tricky if you have a pattern on the fabric if you have a really plain fabric with no pattern, then you khun blended and however you want and we'll be showing that later a swell so in this case it was a little bit trickier, but I was able to match the pattern up pretty well here I am expanding the frame so I've taken extra pictures I've just panned my picture right and left added those sides on and that way I was able to make it look like I was further back away from the subject and so this is the big change I'll go back and forth here between the white before and the light after now the light on me on the subject is great, you know it's glowing it's beautiful the background is already dark that's what I'm looking for and I'm just enhancing that so this change here is obviously adding that then yet making the light look like it's more of a spotlight effect, creating more contrast which makes my skin glow a little bit more and it makes the background a little bit darker so I believe this is the final image I've just made ever so slight change is making my skin a little bit more yellow so that it looks like the light is yellow this is a trick that I love is if you're in photo shop and you want to make the light look like it's from a certain time of day you can change the light in the highlights on lee so you're making maybe the light a little bit more reddish yellow just by adding that color to the highlights once you do that it looks like this was an evening shot instead of being shot in the middle of the day this is the before and this is the after you can see really the biggest change is the contrast that's really what I'm doing here is pumping up that contrasts of then I stand out from the background even more so do a shooting studio or on location we've talked about this already I shoot all on location, I do not own a studio, I get requests sometimes can people come visit my studio and I say no because then you would be in my bedroom and that would be really awkward so I say no to that andi so yes, all on location if I can't shoot on location, I shoot anywhere that I can, you know, in the force behind my house or on my patio whatever I can indio that's where I'm shooting but never in a studio because they're expensive and I don't want to spend money very, very, very cheap what does that mean? Your bedroom is really sparsely decorated oh, yeah, my whole apartment you have just a bed in your room. It's ridiculous. Yeah, one bad one dresser. Nothing else. A cat carrier that's it. I have cats. I love my cats. Okay, all right, so if you shoot on location, you're more likely to have a cohesive edit it's pretty much just effect unless you have your lighting down really, really well and you know how to shoot everything to be able to add it into your final picture. There are amazing people who do that like joel grimes is one who could just shoot everything in a studio shoot a background amazing at editing that together. It's, it's incredible to me, I'm not like that I should on location, I think it's more fun so if you shoot on location it has better consistency with camera angle lighting in perspective I know I've said this before but I cannot stress that enough because if you mess that up it's not going to be believable this is one of those examples of a shot where I shot everything on location and it was really great that I did that because the perspective stayed the same and I locked my focus down so because I had my focus locked on me on the subject I could move those orbs around in the frame and by doing that they went out of focus and that creates believability so let me just pop through here I ended up flipping it later so that's where there's a flip but what I have here is me in the post this is a cz much in the poses I could get there's my little hare foot so I added that hair on later to make it look like there was a breeze coming through and then we have the orbs they're not balls we don't say balls we say orbs I started I did a picture with a man with the balls and then it got a little tricky in the gallery situation so we call them orbs and so I had them I had one stuck to my sleeve and I did that to create a natural shadow so instead of doing that instead of having to re create the shadow I just held it where he needed it there we go I have the natural shadow and by doing that I don't have to cut out the orb itself. All I have to do is just blend in the fabric around it makes it really nice and easy and I'll be talking about that technique leader so here I am just holding it out and I'm being careful with how I'm holding these objects you know I'm not holding it from above where my hand's gonna be in it well holding it from behind that way the orb is blocking my hand so I just have to edit out the side where my sleeve is nice and easy so here I am again moving closer to the camera making funny faces um and I'm just meet bringing that warble little bit closer to throw it more and more out of focus so I have that naturally and here it is really close to the frame so I ended up using all of these in the final image so there you can see you can kind of see where those orbs came in now the ones in the in the far back that are really, really tiny I had to just size those down because there was a cliff there so I couldn't go running off it and, you know, do like the jump and yeah, that wouldn't work so eh? So I made them a little bit smaller but the great thing about these processes that they're really easy to cut out because there their spears they're perfectly circular so I could just select it paste it we're good to go but I'll be talking about those techniques later okay? So when is it okay to just photo shop it because I get that all the time especially when I teach workshops who will say well, can I just photoshopped this then I say can you do you know how to do that? Because if it's possible than sure if you could make it look good, why not? I don't see any reason why not, but I do as much as I can in camera so I'm collecting all of my shots on location at the same time very important to me so I only edit what I can't achieve with my resource is so if I don't have enough money for something and I need to do it in post I do that I'm not against that I love editing but this is one of those examples where I tried to do everything in camera and I did so it was a little bit dangerous to duct tape a fish tank to my head but I did it anyways so here is the before picture so what I did was I got a fish tank and I took a hammer, and I just cracked the bottom of it out there was glass on the bottom, and once I got all the glass out of the bottom, I put it over my head and then used duct tape to just sort of tape it to my neck all around. And I don't know if I have a picture of it in here now, yeah, there she has poor and water into my fish tank, so my friend, help me out with this one obviously couldn't do it all myself, but I did as much as I could in camera, so really from the before and after it's, not that different of a picture, I mean, yes, I'm changing the lighting dynamics and changing, you know how dark it is in the colors, but I achieved their all in camera and I just kept thinking before I did this, that if I couldn't get it in camera, it was going to be a nightmare to edit water inside that fish tank. I didn't wanna have to do that. Plus I wanted it to look natural with my hair floating in the fish tank. So why not of any story about this? I've had a lot of experience with putting my head in jars, and so so. I was I guess it was really early on when I started taking pictures. I have a picture where I'm sort of bending over backwards with my head in a milky jar of water. And I decided it'd be a good idea to actually do this. So I went to target, and I tried on all of the different cookie jars. And andi, people were like, looking at me really strange, you know, down the aisles, just like, what is she doing? So I was taking all of them, see if they fit. And so there's. Only one that really fit properly. I could have kind of a big nose. So it kind of everything hit my nose. You know what? I was trying to put the jars on. I found one that worked, and so I took it home, filled it with water, put a little milk in it to make it a little bit murky. And what I did was I moved my couch up, and I'm not going to do this like right now, but I, uh I back did a back bend over the couch until I was completely upside down here. And once I wass, I lowered my head into the the thing of water. And it was really scary because it was a very heavy glass jar and my husband was, like, sitting on my legs when I wouldn't flip over and my cousin was, you know, on on standby toe, make sure they didn't die, and so I put my head in the jar, boom down there we go and then pulled myself straight up and out as best I could while it working with my timer, you know, I had like, the remote in my hands, and it was ridiculous, so don't do that that that's the moral of my story, okay, so what's my budget, I spend an average of ten dollars per shoot if I were to average everything together, that's probably what it would come out to be, I use things like bed sheets, I use curtains I use what are those things called shower curtains, things like that? I use anything that I can as a backdrop, so I'm not going out and buying backdrops, not that I think you shouldn't, but if you're on a budget it's an awesome thing to do, we're going to be working with bed sheets and curtains later today. Um, the other thing that I do a lot is I will go to the craft store and just try to be inspired all walk around, see what catches my eye buy it and then challenge myself to only spend ten dollars on a specific item so everything that I have to work with for the next two days is all ten dollars or less on I wanted to do that because I wanted to show that you really don't have to have a big budget to make really interesting props, so I try to make the most out of what I have available and so what I mean by available was literally what is in my apartment and this goes back to the tissue box and things like that, but I'm trying to work with everyday objects you know, I love using a good chair or something like that in the picture and and then it sort of pushes me to be inspired by a lot of different things, okay, so this is one of those instances I was able to borrow this amazing cloak for my friend and I had it for about a week and so I wanted to do something really special with it, but it wasn't actually this amazing it was a little bit less so that was the first shot that I took and I had to photograph that fabric several different times to make it look like a really impressive flowing cape, so I photographed it a couple of different times and so I used those images to put it together to create that final effect and this is an example of what I'm doing in post close up so you can see that again because that's a really interesting thing to note is that, you know, I'm not necessarily taking everything that I have shot and saying that's all it khun b I'm trying to see what it could be, what it has the potential to be. So for this image, I've added hair on that was really important to me. I couldn't get my hair moving at the same time, so I did that I've changed my facial expression a little bit and so tomorrow and we're editing, I'll be going over how to change facial expressions so than the models making the face that you want. Obviously I got the line out of the back, I had a power line going through my head uh that's not good um and then I made it really painterly, and I'll also be talking about that as well how to create a painterly effect in your images. This is a really funny one because this was done in my bathtub and this is like the ultimate in using sheets and stuff like that to create an image. So this was the before picture and what you have is the toilet that you can see the duck tapes that I failed to remove on the toilet, a towel hanging in my bathroom door and things like that, things that I did not want in the picture, but I knew what I had to capture to turn it into what I wanted, so I put a sheet down over the toilet and in the bathtub I hung a blanket behind me. I put a sheet over top of me, and then I wrapped a sheet around my head, so four different things that I'm using to mask this space that's really what I'm excited about, but I'm not just stopping there, I'm going forward with creating little details, so I have this sort of letter that I'm holding and that I use some tea to distress it. I I soaked it in tea, scribbled on a little bit, things like that have a flower of a flower, a feather in their fur texture and a pop of color, and it was really important to me. So let me go back actually, before you can see a couple of things are changing here, if you look at my wrist there, I have some blood on it that wasn't there before I did that in post could have easily done that at the time didn't think of it, so there are times when I don't think of something, and I add it later, if it works. And I really I want to kick myself when I do that because I think, why don't I just think of it? But we can't think of everything all the time so it's okay to add stuff in a photo shop? Okay, so how do you create a cohesive image? Um for me, it's just all about making sure everything makes sense and I'm not just talking about the technicals of, you know, the lighting and the camera angle and stuff like that. I'm talking beyond that, making sure everything makes sense. What is your story isn't a story that people will understand, you know, little things like, does the texture and the flow of the fabric match what you're going for? So for example, if I wanted, you know, a really light, soft flowing image, I wouldn't use a really heavy fabric, I would use a really light soft area fabric, so making sure everything makes sense and paying close attention to colors, I am such a stickler for color, I can't even tell you how often I change colors and photo shop until I think that they match exactly as they should. This is one of those images that I decided to change the colors of drastically I didn't know that I was going to do this when I shot it, but it was something in post that I decided on so this is the before image? No, I didn't actually have to do much compositing for the dress and the hair I got all of that in one shot, but as you can see, I'm wearing a blue dress and I thought that would look really, really nice with the background because it was sort of a blue foggy day, but then when I got into post I really like the sky to put in, so here it is being built there we go so here's the sky being added now when I added that sky, I really liked the orange color, so I changed my dress to be orange to match it. If I had kept a blue dress in there, then it would have clashed because blue and orange don't really go together very well. You can't really take my word for that because I cannot match my clothes to save my life, but I'm wearing purple and green right now I'm owning it, I don't care so eh? So I do think though, that I haven't easy time and photoshopped figuring out what colors match or at least what I think matches so I'm not going to let the blue dress stand just because that's how I shot it, I want to change that make it cohesive and so this is what the final image ended up looking like so changing the light in an image something that I do all the time something that I love doing um I will take the image figure out where I want the light to be coming from and then adjust from there so in this picture you can see the one on the left it's yeah that's what it's very doll you have very even light going on around it so in post I decided to keep the light on my body make it really pop make it stand out but then make the background very dark and that's not always an easy thing to do if you're making a super drastic change like this the process that I usually go through is selecting the subject and making sure that they're not going to be affected by the changes and then on ly changing the background that way I'm darkening down the background very seamlessly and I'll be showing this definitely later on tomorrow another example of that now before image I lost it I thought was pretty you know it looked nice the light is nice and even but the backgrounds very distracting because that was the light source we're in an abandoned greenhouse it was coming from above and all in the background and I don't really like to shoot light sources so you're not really going to see you know a window with light coming in in my pictures very often so in this case I thought the lines looked really pretty but not the light so I darkened back down a lot and then I selected the subject and just added light there so that it was a spotlight effect and so you can see from one to the other when you do that you're changing the lighting dynamic no longer is it a flat image it's an image that has a lot of light on the subject now of course you could achieve this by bringing a light out to the location I'm just lazy so I don't do that all right? So changing light again this is a really drastic one and very, very difficult to do underwater this's why don't shoot like this underwater very often, but what I have is a blue background I was shooting in a regular old pool white bottom pool like you would see, so I had to darken that down a lot and in this case I didn't really highlight the subject very much. I let her go a little bit darker as well, but I was trying to skew that blue color because blue and red not good for me I don't like adding those two colors together so by de saturating and darkening the background, the red and the subject can really pop off of it all right changing the light again no, this is a very drastic example so what we have here, this is the before picture we have light coming in from a window that was our only source in this space. So I flattened the light in photo shop. I took it in and what I did was they dulled down the highlights and this was the first step to changing where the light was coming from in the image. So by dulling down those highlights, I'm creating an image where the light source isn't as obvious. So here I am basically changing the light I am putting a light above the door, making it filter into her body, and I'm creating this sort of avenue of light right through the centre of the image and I knew that I wanted to do that when I shot it, but I didn't have any resource is to get that light in the camera, so I did what I had to do to change it. Okay, so sorry you guys can't start that again, huh? Alright, awesome. So do we have any questions? We d'oh okay, start with the studio audience. Okay? So in the first segment you went over how you get inspiration, you have exercises that you dio and then the second sight I'm still at what I'm still there, so the second segment we're showing how you technically put your images together where is the gap like do you do the inspiration exercise before every image do you do it once and then create a couple of images from that? How often do you shoot like where yes so I will do these inspiration exercises about once a month and then I used that from there on out to find inspiration and that's not to say that I don't just get randomly inspired because I do I mean I see things that I think oh my gosh, I can use that aiken go to this location so I typically get two or three pictures out of my inspiration exercises that I loved to create and that's what I'll do for that month and then there are a lot more than that that I just see something that I'm inspired by and decide to shoot it and and work like that. So yeah, typically from doing one of the inspiration exercises I tend to like to run with it right away as much as I can because I mean I'm like most people I think we're all get lazy about it and all sort of lose the passion for it that I had right when I thought of it so as fast as I can get it together then I try and it might not be that I can shoot it instantly or anything, but at least I'm you know, sketching it out writing down the idea getting the props and doing as much as I can to keep myself excited about it. Any other questions in the studio? This goes back to the sgc, this goes back to the, um, the one with e kind of a plane white sky when you added canvas or you, you took extra images to add to it. Since you're adding sky into it, why can't you just do that transparent with a transparency? Because you're going to add sky anyway, make your canvas size larger and then add the sky you totally can. Oh, you totally can that's a really great point. So to clarify what you're saying is basically, you know, why do you have to take extra pictures of a white sky? Because it's white and I don't, um for that one, I had a white sky and I literally just expanded the frame just painted white because I knew that my clouds would stick really well to a white background going to the blue dress that became orange. Do you think that the reason that you felt like you wanted to kind of match the colors was because the blue dresses so cool and everything else in the scene was very warm, definitely so for me, I don't liketo have those contrast ing element. I either want a very warm picture or a very cool picture, and I'll talk about this tomorrow during editing too, because my process is largely to de saturate the image as much as possible and then add color back into it. That way the colors being picked up very naturally buy everything in the image instead of having, you know, adding yellow and having the blue dress pick that up very differently than orange sky. So so yes, I like to have things matching. I liketo have a singular color tone happening throughout the entire image because they're like the cohesiveness of it. I know you say it about the angle's off the camera. Just look in the picture. How do you manage to get the bard and the right one? Go for the photo. You just go randomly taking pictures ofthe bar? Yes, that's exactly it I shoot birds. Any chance I get, I shoot skies. Any chance I get, I shoot textures. I shoot all these things all the time. That way I have them in varying degrees of size and poses and heights and everything. So for example, this picture I didn't do this, but it would have been really smart to capture a bird on the white background because it's basically on that white door it would've been nice and easy to blend in, so thinking about things like that when you're shooting your stock images is really important, having a variety instead of all the same thing, and I notice you just shoot adult, but have you ever tried with kids? And I just guess would be a lot more hard to get them in the right spot for long enough speaking, right? And that's, the thing is that you shouldn't have to take that long with a kid, you know, if you know the pot's already, you know you can show the kid yourself, you can go over there, do it, show them how to do it get one shot and you're done so long as you can get that kid to pose for maybe two minutes, you should be good to go and that's if you're planning beforehand, if you know exactly what you wanted to look like and you can practice with an adult, it won't look too different, you know, on dso that's how I work. I have shot with kids before and I got about ten minutes of really good shooting time in before the fussiness started and, you know, and that's fine and so, yeah, just knowing what you want before you go out is my best in face. Okay, so a couple from the internet actually more than a couple. Okay, we have a lot um s oh, somebody's wondering this is kind of a two parter. So how do you go about finding your cool indoor locations that aren't you're home? And then secondly, eddie sebastian is asking how you overcome your fear and shyness of doing all of this, you know, out in the open air, people can happen to hike into your photo shooter with something right? So okay, so two parts, how do I find the locations? I find locations by walking into them and asking honestly, um, I showed you before, um, abandoned warehouse that I found and that's actually attached to a company that owns the whole building, but nobody uses the warehouse, so I saw it one day walked in said, could I please take a photo in the back? And they said, sure, why not? They didn't care, it was nothing to them, but I do that all the time I walk into random locations, restaurant things that I think are really interesting, and I just say, can I take a picture? And I don't say anything else somebody was just laughing at me the other day because I just shot, uh, well, we're in seattle, so do you guys know the carousel at the pier with the ferris wheel and basically I went inside and I said can I take a picture on the ferris wheel? I'm sorry on the on the carousel and my friend was like you just said take a picture you're going to like actually do a photo shoot and I said yeah, but they don't need to know that it's going to take two minutes so I'm just taking a picture, you know? So so sometimes I do it like that where I know I'm in a very public space that requires a permit so I'm going to try to downplay it and once I get started you know they're not going to be like hey, get out it's only gonna be two minutes anyways s o many ways that's a tangent but yeah that's how I find a lot of my locations I go google maps you know, just try to find what buildings look neat things like that by zooming in on stuff a lot of times I get turned down too, but well, you know it happens but I also use location scouting agencies on leah from teaching a workshop, so if I am that I wanted ethic location so I just go to a location scouting agency and say, what do you got for me? S o the second part is how do I overcome the fear of shooting in these public locations and I used to be really nervous about it I would get really embarrassed especially when somebody would like find me in the trash can and stuff because you know a little strange and whatever but um but then I realized that me doing that stuff and somebody seeing is like the best part of their day because then they get to go home and be like I saw a girl in a trash can today how weird is that it's just funny you know it's like you know why be embarrassed of it you're creating your art and if they don't like it they're never going to meet you again you know you don't know that person who cares what they think great thank you I saw an interesting question come up in the lounge from allie be actually who and I thought it was really interesting when you're doing self ports and you have you know you have the trigger in your hand are you are you putting it in each hand and then photoshopping that is one method the other method is to put in your mouth it's true it works I have a tiny remote so sometimes I just pop it in um actually all the way in your mouth yeah wayne why but I use it on a two second delay so I'm clicking and then I have two seconds so I usually just throw it and then pose and it's actually a really good amount of time to be able to get into your pose so I can't even think of a time when I used it on the instant setting I don't do that so I have two seconds to do something with it sometimes like drop it down the front of my dresser you know anything to hide it but I don't leave it in my hand I love it somebody actually a lot of people are asking about the underwater housing for your camera and that kind of equipment can you tell us about what you know? Absolutely I used like a light as my housing from a camera and they're wonderful because it's a really compact housing so there are a lot of houses that are really big, but you can't really access your camera so this one allows you to sort of swivel now busan stuff like that and change your camera settings and then bring it up like a camera to look through it which is really nice because not all housings allow that so yeah, I use ike alight I used to use a bag it was like deka pack or something like that I don't really know d I c a p a c or something, but that was the first one that I use and it was like one hundred dollars so it was very inexpensive but it acted like one hundred dollar camera bag and uh mind leaked once but luckily leaked when I was testing it instead of actually having a camera in it so that was really lucky but you don't really want that so if you can avoid a hundred dollars camera bag then tried to avoid that but but yeah so I used that and then I used equinox after that and then um sort of upgraded teo like a light thanks right way have another question have you reached a fish tank er for the underwater no but I was having somebody fill me filming underwater like doing underwater shoot and they used a fish tank they had four guys lowering it in the camera inside worked great well dangerous but you know especially if you're an unpredictable water where the water could sort of suddenly move yeah okay we have time for one last question before we go to break and I'm sure you've probably gotten this question a lot so we'll just address this this's from biz arts who says considering the amount of compositing and post processing involved in your work can you still say your photographer or are you a photo shop artist photo illustrator digital artist and how does the fine art community react to the work based on the process versus a purist single photo with some editing yeah totally I mean I don't care what you call me I mean it's so unimportant to what? Ideo and that's? Why? I think it's just so unfortunate that everybody has such emphasis on labels when who cares what you call yourself? Just do what you love to dio that's all I d'oh, I don't care if you call me a digital artist, I don't care if you call me a photographer, it does not matter. The fact is that I take my pictures and then I edit them so you can call it whatever you want. But you got power to the artist, so but galleries react different ways. You know, art collectors react different ways, they say, well, what are you? You know, are you a mixed media artist? What? And I just say on whatever you want to call me and then I leave it at that and I mean galleries always label it as photography because it is it it's a photo and I'm not doing anything digitally creating digital art in a way and you'll see tomorrow my process is so simple that it makes me laugh when people say that I'm not a photographer because the editing is like, really, really easy, but yeah, it just it's just so unimportant.