Tommy Martin Photography

Making of.. Sprayway Autumn/Winter 2012 location shoots

2012-02-24T09:16:00.000-08:00

I do regular commissioned shoots for outdoor clothing manufacturer Sprayway. Most of what I do for them is pretty simple; we take some models, dressed in the waterproofs, fleeces and baselayers that they'll be selling next year, we take them out into the Lake District and we shoot some pictures of them having some fun. Almost all of which is easier than it sounds.

Light is Everything:
As the quality of the light plays the biggest part in deciding the quality of any picture, and we're working in some fairly remote locations, we're entirely dependent on nature to provide us with the goods.

OK, we could haul batteries and portable flash kit into the outdoors if we just wanted to light our models, but my brief for these shoots is as much about the landscape as the model. The fact that the brief is also pretty specific about capturing a natural and spontaneous feel is the final nail in the coffin for any thoughts of artificial light.

So what we're doing is essentially landscape photography. As I'll happily tell anyone who will listen, my landscape photography is a nice by-product of my love of being outdoors. Walking in the Lake District is what I would choose to do with my spare time; being a photographer is incidental. So a landscape shoot is easily organised. I put my boots on, drop my camera case into my backpack and head off. If I get a great picture, it's a bonus. If I don't, it's just a great walk.

Even the most extravagant client is going to get a bit uncomfortable about paying models to follow me around every time I go for a walk, just in case. So we have to plan. As much as the Lake District weather allows planning.

The normal process is to look at the weather forecasts, pick a date in the near future, put everyone on standby for that day and make a decision about whether to actually go ahead the day before. We've only abandoned a shoot due to bad weather once. One other day that had been scheduled for Big Views was repurposed when low flying cloud reduced our options to rather smaller views. So not a bad record, but always touch and go with these things.

People Are Everything Too:
I've been been lucky enough to have some great local talent for our outdoors shoots. For mountain shoots I can call on some proper outdoorsy types, who happen to be self-employed, photogenic and living very nearby. Handily, they're also very fit, and happy to climb that ridge 'just one more time' as many times as it takes to get the shot. They're also quite capable of looking after themselves themselves safe in potentially dangerous places. In fact two of them happen to be Mountain Rescue Team members which takes a whole load of pressure off me and allows me to concentrate more on shooting and less on navigation and safety.

So far we haven't had to abandon a shoot to an MRT call-out, but it's bound to happen one day.

Photo: Tommy Martin ©Sprayway 2012 all rights reserve

Children and/or Animals:
For the kids' gear I happen to know a fantastic family, living nearby and with four little angels who are perfect fit for the prototype clothes that we get sent. The plan for these shoots is very simple; dress them up in the Sprayway gear and set them free somewhere picturesque. And try to keep up.

Knowing What to Leave Behind:
I quickly learned from my first shoot with the kids that the best kit to take is the simplest. When it comes to getting candid, spontaneous shots in the countryside fast and light is very much the order of the day. Tripods, flashes, filters, reflectors and in fact almost all of my other gear stays in the studio. One SLR, for this season a Nikon D7000, a backup, and two lenses. And that's it.

Lenses in this seasons' bag (if you really care) are a very old, very battered 80-200mm f2.8 Nikkor and a relatively new and shiny 17-55mm f2.8 of the same impeccable breeding.

Shiny new kit is all very exciting, but I'm the kind of photographer who prefers the tried, tested and familiar, especially when someone is paying me to get results. I bought the 17-55mm towards the end of last year and I've used it on slightly more than a dozen proper shoots, on location and in the studio, and it seems to be getting nicer to shoot with every time I pick it up. I'm consistently blown away by the quality of the images it can produce.

The aim, as always for this client, is for natural shots of real people doing real things. This season also included a new range of kids socks, which called for a slightly more contrived indoor shoot. Photo shoot days are pretty exciting events for the kids, so getting two of them to stay still long enough to get pictures of socks was almost certainly the longest single shoot of this season. Putting them on the floor, in front of the fire, with a chess board seemed like a simple set up. The fact that their version of chess is a little known variant of the game known as Bounce the Bishop made the whole scene somewhat more animated than I was anticipating.


Photo: Tommy Martin ©Sprayway 2012 all rights reserved

New Faces:

This season I was asked to find some new faces for that hadn't appeared in the previous Spring/Summer collection shoots. Having exhausted everyone we could find in the local-photogenic-self-employed-mountain-guide-pool, we had to come up with a new plan. I started casting for some professional models who were also into being outdoors on some of the modelling websites (purestorm.com and modelmayhem.com).

I happened across a recently engaged couple, Alwyn and Gemita, who fit both specifications perfectly.

We came up with a plan; the models would travel up to the Lake District, stay for a while on standby, and we would shoot them as and when the weather and light was doing good things. My theory was that in any given week you'll get at least two days that will make for some good shots. Not necessarily nice days, you understand. When it comes to landscape photography nice and good are not the same thing at all.

Timing is Everything:
I always start out with a list of key shots that I really want to get, mostly in places that have previously appeared in my landscape portfolio. Having been shooting landscape up here for more than seven years I know my territory pretty well. If I can get the models to these places, at certain times of day, during particular weather/light conditions, then I can pretty much guarantee getting some great stuff.

There's a path into little gorge near here that most people don't know about. It's not easy to get to and it doesn't appear on any maps. At this time of year it doesn't see a whole lot of sunlight, but when it does, it looks stunning. I knew if I could get my models to a specific part of that little gorge, on a clear day, during the brief window when the sunlight reaches the bottom of the gorge, then we'd get something special. Again, easier said than done, in being at the end of deer track that comprises entirely of loose rock, decaying roots and wet moss overhanging fast moving freezing water.. but worth the effort.

Haweswater:
We made a couple of trips to Haweswater. The light a head of the valley is slightly unpredictable in the afternoons, especially at this time of year, but it does have its moments. Particularly on improbably calm day like this one turned out to be...

Just One More Day:

The most incredible luck with the weather caused us to extend the final shoot of the season for an extra day. We opted to go out to Ullswater for the final part of the more urban Lifewear range. The very nice folk at Ullswater Steamers were extremely accommodating and helpful. Particularly as I didn't come up with the idea of using the steamer until breakfast the same day.


Photo: Tommy Martin ©Sprayway 2012 all rights reserved

The Sprayway Autumn/Winter 2012 shoots have provided me with the opportunity to make some images that I'm really proud of, and allowed me to spend some time with some fantastic people in some truly amazing places.

Photo: Alwyn Du Preez

What's not to like..?

Roll on Spring/Summer 2013…

Karl Bowman Green Screen Shoot

2012-01-27T05:09:00.000-08:00

Just before Christmas I had another opportunity to collaborate with the fantastically talented Couture designer Karl Bowman.

We had two models and six dresses from his new Red Carpet collection to shoot for upcoming magazine feature. The plan was, as with our previous session, to shoot the models again the green screen in my studio and composite in to various backgrounds. The previous set of images had all ended up against contrasting urban environments, mostly taken from stock photographs.

This time I really wanted to try using some big dramatic skies and landscapes as backgrounds to make some striking and (hopefully) very different fashion images.

Big dramatic skies and landscapes I happen to have easy access to...

I had originally thought that I'd be able to trawl through my back catalogue for unused/not quite finished shots to find some suitable backgrounds.

The first problem I came across using my own "stock" landscapes was that I just don't allow space for adding extra elements when I'm framing a landscape shot. Plenty that were almost right, but not enough sky, or foregrounds that were simply at the wrong angle for the models to stand on. After a few hours of hunting through the lightroom library it became pretty obvious that I was going to better off getting out and hunting images in the real world. I got pretty lucky in the dramatic weather department and had the first few in the bag before the studio shoot was scheduled. The rest presented themselves within a few days of finishing the studio side of things.

Which was just as well, given that I had a total of eight days between the shoot day and the print deadline...

Studio Day:
The studio shoot was a pretty straightforward single day. I'm sure I've still got a lot to learn about green screen shooting, but I'm getting pretty confident about getting the lighting and exposures that work. The big pitfall that I've learned to avoid is not over lighting the green screen. Sure, it needs to have some light thrown at it, and it needs to be fairly even, but it doesn't need a lot of light. The more light you throw at it, the more sickly reflected green spill you'll get catching on the edges of your models. And that's not a good look for anyone.

In a lot of cases, when I'm using a soft fill on my subject enough of it will reach the backdrop to do the job. In the shot in the right I ended up without any dedicated light on the backdrop; the poly boards I use to block glare from the backlight (right of the model) were bouncing plenty of light onto the green. Between that and the front fill we had more than enough.

I've also taken to standing the models on either black or white PVC, rather than on the trailing end of the green screen itself. It adds a little bit time in photoshop, but cuts out the faint green uplight effect of standing the model on the screen.

I've started looking at my on-camera image reviews in black and white, which makes it a whole lot easier to make judgements about light, exposure and contrast when you're not being distracted by the overbearing greenness of it all. Models and clients seem to like it too, I guess partly because people always look good in black and white.

My new toy on this shoot was a big white beauty dish that I was using with a 'showercap' diffuser over the front. Fantastic quality of light, softer than a softbox, perfect catchlights reflected in the eyes. Just all round lovely. I use it in various positions on different shots, on the right you can see it on a boom above and slightly to the right of the model.

Backlight is always a critical part of lighting for a successful chromakey image. You need something to lift the subject off that backdrop. Happily, more often than not, my landscape work involves looking into the light. That's where the texture and drama is found. Even more happily, this means that the easiest style of lighting to work with in the studio, and which creates the easiest images to work with in photoshop, also happens to be the best match my background landscapes. I like when things fit together like that. It makes me feel like it must have been a really good idea to start with.

Planet Photoshop:

My top tip for keying out green screen backdrops is put your image in a layer group, assign a mask to the group and edit the mask to remove the background, rather than erasing bits of the master image. That way, you can always go back and re-edit your edge.. And, added bonus, you can put other layers inside the layer group and they will automatically only be visible within your outline. For example, I add a layer which I then take an airbrush to for retouching. Because that retouching layer is inside the layer group I don't have to worry about strokes that run over the edges of the model; anything outside our outline is automatically hidden by the layer group's mask.

If that last paragraph doesn't make any sense whatsoever (and assuming that this fact bothers you in some way), you'll need to read the full, in depth article on photoshop chromakey techniques that I will, one day, find time to write...

Retouching:
OK, you could argue that the beauty and fashion industries are doing terminal damage to our collective psyches by portraying human beings in an unattainably perfect light, and in some cases, you'd have a point, but honestly, I'd be very surprised if there was anyone out there who couldn't tell the difference between documentary realism and playing at dressing up. No, the model's skin was actually normal human skin, yes her eyes are actually that colour, and no, ballgowns are not appropriate clothing for winter mountaineering.

Most of the retouching is achieved with a good old fashioned airbrush tool. Sampled colours from the original image and very carefully brushed in to a new layer. I always use a wacom tablet for this bit and set the airbrush's flow to 10-20% to build up the brushwork up very gradually. It's easy to get carried away and end up with a model that looks as though she has been extruded from a single sheet of polyurethane. Less is more is the mantra and the eraser plays an equally important part as the brush. Spots and blemishes tend to get taken out with the clone tool.

Compositing:
Once the model is removed from overbearing greeness of their background, it's just a question of finding them a new place that looks like it could be home. Again, fairly complex subject, but the short version is that matching the angle of view is critical. Everything else, like exposure, noise, white balance, contrast, sharpening can be tweaked. But if the camera was three feet off the floor in the studio and six feet off the floor on location, the model is never going to look like she's in contact with that ground.

The original shot below happened to be one of the few that was already in the library before we started. I had no idea it was going to end up as a background. Karl like the idea of something with arches playing a part in this image, because of the viaduct construction of the dress. Haweswater pump tower is my go-to structure for arches, being such a great structure that is so obviously straight out of a fairytale.

The obvious change is that the image has been flipped to match the direction of the key/back light in the studio shot.

As mentioned earlier that strong backlight that works so well on chromakey shoots for technical reasons, is a great match for how I like to shoot landscapes. Happy days.

A slightly less obvious tweak is that the foreground shoreline has been extended to give our model
a bit more space to stand without obscuring the fairytale tower. This is achieving very simply by copying the whole background, shifting it left and then masking out everything but the rocks. The bottom of the dress covers a whole mess of mismatching rocks.

The final tweaks are mostly edits to colour, levels and contrast. Some adjustments are made just to the model, some to just the background. Others are made to the whole image.

The contrast adjustments in this case involved some odd techniques that involve editing individual colour channels. But that's another complex area that will eventually lead to a whole article of its' own.

One commonly used cheat is to apply a 'photo filter' layer to the whole image. In this case a simulated Wratten 80 cools things down a bit and helps blend the foreground and background colours.

And a bit of gaussian blur applied to the distant background just to give a slightly decreased depth of field to lift the model off the background a little. Odd, having spent so long making her blend it to the background, but odd plays a big part in this whole process...

Julie Watson Book Cover

2011-09-30T10:01:00.000-07:00

One of my shots of Haweswater Reservoir's pump tower has been used as a component on the cover of Julie Watson's latest novel.

Kind of odd, seeing my work as a part of someone else's composite. And very cool.

The rights managed license was arranged by Tim Kahane at the endlessly inspiring Trigger Image.

Trigger Image are pretty unique for an image library in the fact that they have opted to develop a very definite house style and avoid the standard 'cover everything' approach of most stock libraries. It's dark, gothic, edgy, atmospheric and.. well, right up my street.

I was very flattered to be invited to join Trigger way back when they were just starting out. It's great to see them getting so many talented artists onto so many book covers these days.
Trigger represent the bulk of my fine art landscape work (yes, Tim, I will be sending you some new stuff very soon)...

My original shot looked a bit like this:

Scooter Shooter

2011-09-24T09:11:00.000-07:00

The Final Composite Portrait

I like it when I find extra bonus shots in my library. This fantastically restored original Vespa scooter was wheeled into my studio for a green screen portrait session with actor/artist/filmmaker Andy Murray.

The purpose of the session was to make a retro-cool composite shot of Andy and scooter, relocated via the magic of Photoshop from a barn in Cumbria to Brighton seafront. The shot above was simply an exposure test I took while Andy was getting ready.

The backdrop was masked out in photoshop, the scooter's body panels were airbrushed a little to remove some of the unwanted reflections and the last stage was reducing the whole thing to black and white using an adjustment layer, set to reproduce the effect of a high contrast blue filter.

Original Shot

As a general rule, when shooting against a green screen, you want as much distance as physically possible between the subject and the screen. Get too close to the back drop and everything starts catching the awful reflected green light that spills off the backdrop. I've had problems with a horrible reflected green cast up-lighting subjects on previous green-screen shoots. Fine for a zombie shoot, but not much use for anything else, so I now tend to use white paper directly underneath the subject. It makes for a little more work making a mask for the lower part of the subject, but a whole lot easier than removing a green glow from under someone's chin.

New Things

2011-09-11T05:02:00.000-07:00

So... we've just opened a new show at my gallery, next week I'll be launching a new website, in the next couple of weeks there will be a some new shoots happening in the studio... and today I'm starting a new blog. September is officially going to be The Month of New Things.