World Travel Photography from the Comfort of a Studio

Who needs to travel the world anymore? If you do I doubt you need to bring a camera along for your trip. Avoid the hassles of the TSA and leave your gear at home. With some Photoshop, stock photography and my skills we can put your family or you anywhere in the world.

I know that the word epic is overused – so I won’t use it here – although I should. This was a super amazing awesome photo shoot with some fantastic results. I will confess – this one took a lot of work. I have gotten so use to getting things right in camera that I don’t need to go into Photoshop unless I want to.

In the case of these 20 photographs I wanted to take the studio photographs and place the family members into different scenes and locations from around the world. Some of these edits took 10 minutes – which is a lot compared to your basic photo editing. A few of these took upwards of an hour. I am clearly not charging enough. However, I am also in my learning phase here so I am cutting my teeth and practicing – a lot!

Many of these photographs came from various stock photography websites. Lately I have used iStockPhoto and ShutterStock when I buy photos. There is Morgue File which is free – which is a bonus. Until I am a world traveler I don’t have photos from every country, city or location that would meet my needs in creating my artwork. I think down the road I will have to include a stock photography fee for projects like this – if I am doing some serious compositing work these photographs can get expensive quickly. Some of the photographs I would have wanted to use were $100. That is a bit expensive if the client buys my edited composite for $50. I would be selling photos at a loss technically.

This is my just thinking out loud. But I also believe in being upfront with my clients.

Compositing has been a challenge. I am definitely learning what makes for good lighting, composition, story, and ultimately an image that will look cool. I will bend and break reality as I see fit to make my reality seem more appealing. In some cases I know there should be certain shadows here or there – but if they are not adding to the aesthetic beauty of the image I will leave them out – or create them so transparent they don’t distract.

I think I have given up on the traditional photoshop techniques of creating shadows. I am now more likely to paint my own shadows with color, curves and dodging & burning. And it works pretty well. The one downside is when I have a deadline. I wish I had more time in the day – but I will do the best I can with the time I have.

This was a particularly fun photo shoot. The family each had their own chance to shine. We tried to customize a location for each person. The idea of sticking one person into an aquarium was particularly fun. I had a lot of fun painting light rays, hand impressions and reflections to try and sell these fakes.

Sometimes you work with what you have. Searching some of the stock agencies can be frustrating. Looking for a photo where there is a “floor” to stand the people on is one thing. But then to find a photo with ideal light can be another challenge. The following photograph had a yellow tint and I had to incorporate that to the whole photo.

I have certainly been given a license to experiment and I think that is paying off. I have the chance to mix my lighting style, my Photoshop work, and people into something that may never even be possible. I doubt I will ever have a client fly me to Europe for family photos or sneak a 12 year old into a night club let alone get a nice camera and lighting gear into that night club.

There are the beginning talks of my family taking a cruise through the Mediterranean in the next 3 years. That would be awesome. Until that time I have never visited Europe. I am sure I will get there. I am also hoping to make it to New York, Seattle, North Carolina, and Disneyland again in the next year or two. Until that time I am going to have to live with the stock photography. You find a few gems and hopefully I won’t have to use them over and over and over and over again. I might have to start shooting stock just to pay for the stock photographs I hope to use.

Finally some backgrounds I actually created myself! The downside of stock photography is using the JPG files as supplied by another photographer. When I use my own photographs I have the RAW file format and I can change the white balance, exposure, noise, and other settings. This gives me so much more latitude in my photography. BTW, to other photographers – you should be using Photoshop’s Smart Objects in your compositing. Your background, your subject, any objects should be smart objects for as long as you are editing. The more time in Photoshop you spend the more likely a client or art director will want to make some changes.

When I took some of these photographs I had no clue they would become backgrounds. I am trying to find and make time to go and create some fresh backgrounds that I can use in future photography. I think that means a lot of photowalks in downtown SLC and Provo. There are so many locations with potential – I just need to make the time!

I really like graffiti – it makes an awesome background for most anyone. I might not put a CEO in front of a graffitied wall but it would look cool.

Another location I have never been to – Tokyo. For many of these locations I can’t imagine shooting on location anyway. I am sure New York has some law against putting down some light stands and photographing in the street, park or other locations. With compositing I can get clients into cool locations without asking them to break the law.

This photograph is really cool. If you know what strobist techniques are then this would look familiar – I think. And this looks exactly what I would do if I was in Paris, in the street with one light stand on camera left. A little bit of a warming gel and a soft box and blamo!

This is one I am also proud of – we had this shot envisioned and the challenge was to find taxis that were facing the correct direction. Hunting stock photography can take a little while – and the good news is this shot was on one of the free stock photography sites. Yes, I have to deal with smaller file formats and more JPG compression. However, some Photoshop skills and some plugins I use will help cover that up. Painting shadows and reflections in a wet asphalt was even more challenging. I had a few eureka moments on how to paint and clone shadows – and they worked!

Last photograph is 2 different options of the same photograph. I will count them as two different composites since I replace the sky for the shot. The client had seen the clouds from a previous composite of mine and they wanted that as an option. At first they had blue skies and white clouds. Change that up for some red sunset and even more blamo!

I hope you enjoyed this long blog post. The photo shoot took about an hour to do in studio. I then edited the photos in studio and spent about 2 days and maybe about 24 total hours editing. That is a LOT of time to edit a photo shoot. I don’t want to be coming away at a minimum wage salary so I will be working on a price package for this kind of photo shoot. I think it is totally fun and cool – but a lot of work.