Lessons
Lesson Info
Class Introduction
Thank you so much. I'm excited. Excited to be in New York, Excited to be here for a week and pretty excited to teach you about compulsive photography. Nothing to be afraid of. A bill demystify it. Take all that stuff out of it because this is pretty darn simple. Then you know the basics of it, you know, to follow the light. No, to follow the height and all that stuff, the respective for the camera. Then everything will fall together seamlessly. So three parts of this lecture gonna start telling you about who I am, how I came to composite photography showing my commercial work in that process. I'm a lot of layers. I'll show videos of how the pictures came together. Talk about how that's done that way, how we could use for the shop. I said pool, not just a source. And then we'll get into middle part, which will be the practical elements of column deposit. Photography will talk about the camera height, how to make that happen like direction. The quality of the light, the color correction,...
all that stuff that goes into the practical ness of it. The last part will be to sit down in 40 shop. It will be the last third of the lecture. We're gonna take some files, a case study, which I have here, and we'll go through this process on the computers. You could see all the parts and pieces on my imagery. All right, so that's what I did. That's how I make my living. They're gonna fast forward, fast backwards. This is 1995 and I came to the U S. To study. I'm from Norway and I did one major decision. Then, because of my father being an engineer, I decided that I would take one computer class every semester throughout school. The school I attended was really forward thinking and that they set up a computer art department in 95 Square Macintosh front floppy disk drive. I started that hardware software and this is a mouse. It was for the shot 10 no layers, no nothing. And as I matured through my education, which was dark rooms for by five cameras, old school, traditional photography, schooling, I also did the computer part and I was done with school. I think I was a part of the very first generation of photographers who really seamlessly walked between the digital and the practical analog world. I think we asked that generation we started using photography and the computer as a part of one, not one informing the other. So what you will see here through my work is that the computer and composites is an extension of the photography. We started the idea of the execute and fulfill its not like this, they think, Oh, what are you going to create? A photo shop? We actually think about images that come up in an idea and they execute it from scratch. Right. As I came out of school, the old search for our style and I'm gonna speak to that for a minute because it's important. I go now taking some pictures, I sat down at the computer. This is all film a scanned it put in some clouds and this picture came out and I had this epiphany. I thought, Just this is me. This is everything I've been seeking for when it came to my expression how this painterly palette like quality all the stuff the rest in native individually was inherent in that picture and the 16 17 years since I took this picture, I have just trying to master this sort of craft Early work mine where I started exploring for the shop, a simple ass adding a cloud and moving the rock over. I came to the Mendocino Coast to different coz. I wanted to shoot both places and then then I thought, Why don't I put the two together? This is two different coz, a sky added. And then the story coming afterwards, I wanted to do a series of dioramas. These are museums that stacks of German animals and painted backgrounds. There's no way you can get into these because they're behind glass again, using the computer, going to these museums, shooting the backgrounds and then putting it together in a photo shop. So this is my early sort of adventure into composite photography doing it because I wanted to fulfill these ideas. I wasn't necessarily easily to do without and then exploring photo shop as a tool, not just as a creative outlet but a tool to extend the vision I had for my photography. So I find this to be important because a lot of people go wrong and they're composite photography because they start, was it not? The computer would encourage you to be photographers and not retouch er's use photography used composite as a tool for your photography and not the other way around. A lot of people sit inside and they think what they're going. What you gonna do? Start putting things together and the images won't be seamless That way you start in the wrong end. You got to start with the idea started light, find what you're drawn to us a photographer, find your vision and then use composites to extend that and this supply, by the way, to a lot of different genres. Not just mine, not just advertising everything that you do that then photography. This can be applied to it. The important part is finding what resonates with you. You see these two examples? I think there's a reason for me really being drawn to the image on the right. Why did I find a home there? Why did I find that this was Mia's photographer? It was because I grew up with this stuff on the Left Classic Region paintings, classic Region Nature. I've recreated that painting on the left. In some other work of mine, and it's taken right next to where we have a summerhouse. Fine with your visual identity is explore what that ISS and a visual awareness will inform the compulsive we're gonna talk about later. It's not about again just taking a picture and trying to do something with it in photo shop. It's having an idea and letting that unfold within the computer, so that makes up my early part. One is being curious about computers establishing a relationship between classic photography and the computer and then applying that in a way that filled my vision and in that comes advertising photography. I want to speak a little bit about composites in the value of it, and I got invited to speak here. They talked about what I would speak about last time I was here. For a week, I talked about a roadmap to commercial photography, and this time composites came up to belong together because what I've seen and changes the last few years, the real value of my photography as a commercial photographer, Ihsan Composites It's me as a problem solver. It's me being able to execute ideas for others. There's so many photographers out there now. Instagram influencers, the people that shoots selfies that is getting a lot of the advertising market. So to stand out as a photographer today, you really need something special. You need to have your identity, which we talked about briefly, and you need to fulfill that in a manner. I think composite photography is an extraordinary tool toe. How if you master it, apply it to your vision. You're very ahead of the curve. I think 80 or 90% of my work today, as really one of the top advertising photographers in the country comes from solving problems and using the computer to fulfill a client's vision. This is Spanish tourism, which have been a great clients of mine. They come to the island, offered Aventura. They like one side of the island visually, but there's no wind on that side. Still gonna shoot the world champion and kite surfing. What did he do? They use a computer to solve the problem. The shoot the island. On one side, you go to the other side of the shoot the kite surfer and 52 together. I'll speak more to this process because, you see, I should left right and then add the layers to them. And I'll speak more to this process. But essentially to shoot. The background played. I focused on that, then issued the kite Surfers. I focused on that and I sit down in the computer and I'm asking together Spanish tourism. It come to this place in Barcelona. The client wants classic Barcelona and architecture. The art director talks about having depth into the picture is seeing the Long Street of Barcelona. The two doesn't exist together. Problem solving it. Go to a street, the shoot architecture. We go to the next street over that you see right here in issue the depth. And then they put those together. This is campaign, uh, done For Genentech was about exploring going deeper. Going further. A place like this doesn't exist. They looked at caves everywhere, from New Zealand to the U. S. Caves get really dark and that no, like it's in there. Nothing grows issue that came in Alabama issued the greens and waterfall in Hawaii, and they put the two together from the initial part rice or extended my vision into this is what we want to create, and they just layer it on. I started thinking bigger. What can we do? That's not really practical? What can we do That's whimsical walking media that doesn't really belong together? How can we create stuff that's completely off ideas and not really grounded in aesthetic and problem solving? Did something like this that started leading into other commercial work that was more beyond what you see, but more of what you imagine.
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
If you are expecting to learn how to composite, this is not the course for you. However, if you want to know the fine details of compositing well, you want to refine your work, this is the course.
Student Work
Related Classes
Commercial