A few images from AD Miami

This is Maria, who dances with passion!  This may be my favorite dance image, ever. Her dance had great lines, her leaps were confident and strong, and her face was really always smiling.  For me as a photographer, there is no way I’m not going to create amazing images with that combination of grace, beauty, and attitude.  The foreground image of Maria stretching is classic, and would stand on its own just fine.

But this is a piece about movement, and I hope you can feel the motion and direction of every leap, bend, and pirouette.  Movement is fundamental in video, but often conspicuously absent in still imagery.  It can be conveyed by holding the shutter open longer while the subject sails past, or by physically moving the camera during capture (imagine photographing a race car as it drives past, and panning the camera from left to right as the car drives past).

Movement gives an image fluidity, and helps our eyes wander smoothly around the composition, but return again and again to the only still figure – Maria stretching in the foreground.  Thanks for looking, and I hope you’ll remember the power movement can give to an image.  Will

Here’s another Multi Image Blend piece of a senior I photographed recently.  I do these Image Blends to tell extraordinary stories, and I think they are far more impactful than a traditional head and shoulders portrait.

Meet Jacob – a Falmouth High School Senior with a purpose.  While other kids were hanging at the beach this summer, Jacob worked full time as an electrician.  He also started his own commercial landscaping company, and has all the responsibilities of a small business owner.  But what really sets him apart in my mind is his sense of civic duty.  Jacob is a volunteer fireman, and would rather fill his spare hours keeping Falmouth safe than goofing off at the mall.

Thanks for looking.  I think this poster shows our mission at Focus Photography – to create extraordinary images of unique individuals.  I hope you like it.  Will

This is Evan from Gray New Gloucester. If you dont recognize the orange jersey – hes a goalie, and more than capable of stopping anything you can kick at his net. Hes also the kicker on the football team, a force on the basketball team, and a pretty good guy all around. But this image celebrates his soccer experience, and all of the roles he plays as a goal keeper.

The shots that we used to produce this poster were all taken in our studio. If you want a poster like this when you come in for your senior portraits, then youll need a uniform and any appropriate accessories. I love making these unique images that show the passions of our clients.

Thanks for looking. Will

In November of last year I was commissioned by Ocean Properties to create some images of a new pool they were building at the Samoset Resort in Rockport. If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time you know – the Samoset is one of my favorite hotels in New England, and I was jazzed to create some images.  The panorama above is the image they chose to go with, and for a year now, I haven’t told anyone how it was created.  Next week I’m shooting the pool again, now that the bar is complete and the landscaping done, and I think I can finally share what went into creating the image above.

First, I should show you the scene when I photographed this:

The pool was finished, but the ground wasn’t, and it was a less than perfect day. It rained before these images were taken, and snowed after, and the winds were so strong they kept blowing the chairs around.  Also, we were shooting in the late afternoon to best show the fire in the firepit that hadn’t been completed, and the sun was low in the sky and shining into the camera lens. I’m just saying, I had a few obstacles.  Here’s what I did.  I shot a series of bracketed exposures for each of the images below, one image over exposed, and one under.

Each of this series was blended into a high dynamic range file in photoshop, so that the sky looked like summer, and the grass looked brighter.  Here’s an example of one of the hdr files:

When this was completed, I had five images just like the one above.  These I took back into Photoshop, to blend them into one long panorama shot.  Here’s what that looked like:

All that was left to do was to plant some grass, and shine the sun on the pool a little more.  Here’s the final image one more time so you can see it complete:

We do a fairly high amount of commercial shooting, and there’s always one important expectation for the photographer:  You have to come through.  No matter what the job site looks like, or the weather does, or the client doesn’t have ready, the only thing anyone cares about, is what will the photographer deliver.  Now you know my secret to creating multi image blends.  Thanks for looking – Will.

On Prince Edward Island in Canada, there is a network of bike trails hundreds of miles long, perfectly manicured paths meandering through beautiful countrysides, and almost completely untraveled and open.  On a three hour ride, it wouldn’t be at all unusual to pass less than ten other people enjoying the trails.  There have been days riding there where I’ve only passed work crews trimming the branches or mowing the lawns, and no other bikers at all.  The stream in this image is typical of some of the scenery you’ll find on the eastern side of the island.

For you photo geeks out there like me, this is a five exposure image (-4,-2,0,+2,+4), tonemapped to emphasize the sky.

This is the harbor at Malpeque, the most colorful harbor I’ve ever seen. It’s like the San Francisco of working waterfronts.  When I can, I’ll post some more images from this incredible harbor.  In the meantime, this is a textural image. When I work with images, I want to evoke a feeling, or a sensory impression in the image.  In this case, even though the colors of the village are amazing, I wanted to let you feel textures – the peeling paing, the three types of asphalt, the rusty roofs – these all have a tactileness to them that I wanted the image to evoke. I hope you like it.  Will

After yesterday’s really fast looking motorcycle, I wanted to show a speedboat I photographed this summer. This is a multi-exposure shot, and I’ve obviously played with the colors to sing of summer, but the end result is a super shiny image of a very fast boat.  Hope you like it – Will

Thanks for looking – Will

Living in Maine, Lobster Traps are a normal part of the landscape, cluttering up the piers like old tires in a junkyard.  Except that what they represent – a rugged way to make a living by harvesting the most delectable little bugs – is a quintessential part of the Maine mystique.

A lobster trap on a deserted beach – this makes sense, doesn’t it? 

But this, a bus-stop yellow bench, waiting at a beach that will never have a whole bus worth of people on it, well, this is a little out of place.  Is it fuel for a bonfire, or just the world’s least comfortable beach chair?  You be the judge.

This is a small fishing village on Prince Edward Island with the scariest wooden bridge anywhere. It’s also got an industrial beauty to it, having fish shacks next to miles of dunes and beach grass.

This is Alex, a 14 year Dance Veteran, who came to us recently for his senior portraits.  It’s not uncommon for us to work with students with exceptional skills – most of the seniors who chose to come to Focus are exceptional in at least a few ways.  Anyway, when we get people with a skill, we try to create a print that really shows that off – and this motion blur image of Alex in the air was an instant favorite for me.

Dance moms in particular often ask us why we want their son or daughter to bring a costume or leotard – dance schools are photographed regularly, they think, and they have a still image of their child in a ‘dance pose’.  When they see the posters – they understand.  This is nothing like a dance school picture.

Thanks for looking – Will.

This is an image of the Wentworth’s gorgeous ballroom ten minutes before the bride and groom (Carey and Ben) saw it.  Yes, we have images without the Wentworth staff in them, but I love having an action shot that shows what’s going on in addition to the perfect and still shots.  In this case, Jenny and her staff are filling all the champagne flutes while the guests are mingling and drinking cocktails in the hallway.

Thanks for looking – Will.

Honestly, I have no idea what this piece of equipment is doing here, surrounded as it is by shrubs and grasses, and filled with wildflowers. Is it a metaphor; is it an artist’s installation?  I don’t know.  But I really liked that it was parked here not fifty feet from a retail shop, in the middle of downtown Charlottetown. 

This is a five stop HDR multi-image exposure to get the sky and the shadows of the yard in the same tonal range.

This is a multi-image cross process.  The shadow sections of our image have been white balanced for the cool light of dawn, while the highlights and sky are balanced to emphasize the sky.  Lucia’s sister Nadia has a house just down the road from this farm, and I love the light patterns on the hay rolls.

This is the warm sun of the late afternoon reflecting red and yellow on this multi exposure, HDR image.

This is the same bridge as yesterday’s post, but with the view of the traveller, showing the expectation as one crests a footbridge, and the really interesting light that falls onto the beams. The day after I shot this, I saw a workman removing and replacing the first two beams at the bottom here (evidently, they were a little rotted).

St. Peters Bay is known for the mussels that are raised in the harbor, and is an entry point to the Points East loop of Prince Edward Island.

Here’s another example of a multi-exposure image and the fun, painted look it gives a photograph.  With a standard, single exposure the shadows below and on the bridge would be so dark that you would see almost nothing there. By combining both very bright and very dark exposures, we get an image with lighting the way we see it (our eyes adjust very quickly to luminosity changes), but not really the way that it is. 

Thanks for looking – Will

Here’s a different angle of the same harbor, and I like the colors in this image much more than yesterday’s image.

On the North side of P.E.I. is a fishing village, Montesque, that could be anywhere in Maine, except for the brightly colored paint scheme, and the low rental prices.  Slip rates for boats in this harbor were $15 a week, or $50 for the whole season!!!!

Part of my newfound fascination with photographing boats.  This slip is right downtown.

This is a multiple exposure image taken underneath the bridge in yesterday’s post – visually, this is a very dark and dreary place, but this image is made by using exposures much brighter than what we see and combining them with normal, afternoon light.  I think the result is almost cheery.  Thanks for looking.

This is the scariest bridge in the world, and I hope this image conveys some of the uncertainty a driver faces when approaching this bridge. First, it doesn’t really look wide enough for a car to cross, much less sturdy enough, so you wonder if you’re supposed to park and walk across.  Then, there’s the fact that you can’t see the other side of the bridge, which arcs up and over a canal, so you really have no way to know if another car is coming towards you.  Which would be good to know, because the local fisherman drive over this bridge really fast, and there definitely isn’t room for two at the top.