Look ma, no Photoshop!
Yes, those were the day my friend, those were the days. The days when Adobe was a type of house in the Southwest. When you had to be a good photographer and not a good computer artist. When you had to create everything created in your imagination in the camera. When you sometimes had to actually focus your own camera’s lens…can you imagine? Oh the horror!!!
Don’t get me wrong, as I always tell my online students with the BPSOP, and in my “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops I conduct around our planet, consider being a good photographer and capture as much as you can in the camera…including the best exposure.
I also tell them that I use Photoshop all the time, but to make the minor adjustments that I couldn’t achieve before clicking the shutter. For me, the challenge/fun is doing it on location and not in my office in front of my computer.
I guess that the hardest production shots to pull off in the camera were in car photography. It was very difficult to get it right, and if you didn’t the car clients would not be happy. When the digital age really took hold, it spelled death to the car shooters that made a living just shooting cars. A great many of them had to close the door. agencies and clients were shooting the cars CGI style…in the studio against a blue or green screen. They would either go out and shoot the environment/landscape separately, or just buy one from a stock agency. The results were and still are mostly awful; the main reason is the light never matches.
Ok, now to the photo above.
This was shot for the cover of the Isuzu full line car brochure. I had a location scout find a road that would lead into the sunset and make the dirt the car kicked up glow from being backlit. I gave her the Sunpath readings and with her Morin 2000 hand bearing compass, she was able to pinpoint where the sun was going to set. I was positioned right over the road in a cherry picker so that the car would come out from right underneath me.
The dirt is actually called Fuller’s Earth. It’s a very fine powder used to accentuate dust or even explosions in cinematography. We spread it over the existing dust from the lift all the way down to the horizon. When the sun was at the degree I wanted, I had the car start driving to the sunset. I was communicating with the driver via walki-talki, to have him adjust the speed to maximize the glowing dust.
It was a lot more fun than sitting in front of a computer to achieve something similar…if I even had the skills!!!
Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com and follow me on instagram www.instagram.com/barabanjoe. Check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime.
JoeB
