Had a great shoot last week with Alison and Nadine…we started at the Kensington Metro Park, then made our way up to Milford. Weather was BEAUTIFUL! Near the end, the rain started to sprinkle, but held out long enough for us to wrap up the shoot. Here are a few of my faves…
Hey all! We’re so excited to announce our brand new lighting workshop, to be held in Utah on July 13 and 14! The classes will be taught by myself, and special guest speaker, Brittni Schroeder. For more details on the workshop, pricing, and registration, please visit the workshop website HERE!
It’s been about a year now since we offered our first workshop, and it’s been SO MUCH FUN meeting all of our amazing attendees from the past year’s workshops. We’ve built a lot of new friendships with people throughout the country (and Canada, Gabi and Char…we love you!). One of the best parts of the workshop (at least in my opinion) is our private forum that all attendees belong to after the workshops. The forum has grown with each workshop, and it’s such a great place to continue to learn, share, and grow. We’re so grateful for all the attendees, what they are to us, and for the inspiration and support they give to not only us, but all those on the forum. But I also don’t want to hog them! So I’d love to share with you some images from a few of the attendees that have been posted on their blogs or facebook. Take a second to click their images and check out their other shots from the workshop and view more of their work so they might be an inspiration to you as well.
Image by Cortnie Steoger
Image by Danielle Colombo
Image by Jenna Connor
Image by Josh Halversen
Image by Jennie Cannon
Image by Kim Hauman
Image by Laura Finley
Image by Lisa Rajt
Image by Maryrose Brame
Image by Tiffany Eberline
Image by Up The Hill Photography
Had a great shoot with Mallory recently at the beautiful Mill Race Village and downtown Northville (and for all you Mill Race shooters, yes we had a permit 
). We had a bit of wind, but I thought it added an awesome element to the shoot. For a Michigan March, we couldn’t have asked for a better day! Here are a few of my faves from the shoot.
So I’ve made no secret about my LOVE for Totally Rad’s new plugin for photoshop called RadLab. In contains basically all of their actions from previous action sets, along with some new ones that can only be found in the plugin. I wrote a tutorial on using RadLab a few months ago, which you can see by clicking HERE. So for those of you who haven’t heard of RadLab, and aren’t convinced to go over to my earlier post, let me give you a little explanation. It’s actions and recipes on STEROIDS! It basically opens up a panel where you can hover over all their actions one at a time (represented as thumbnails of your image with the action applied…I know, SICK, RIGHT?!). As you hover over the thumbnail, your big image reflects the effects of the action as well. As you apply an action, all the thumbnails and the main image update, allowing you to continue to see how the image will look as you stack the actions. And you can change opacity, etc right in the plugin panel. Then once you click finish, it creates a smart object in you your layers panel…and will allow you at any time to go back into the RadLab plugin and change things up. Sold yet? If you haven’t yet, take a second to go read the earlier post for more on how RadLab works.
For those of you who are already sold, are thinking about buying RadLab, or already have it…here’s the cherry on top. I’m going to show you how to create an action that will save you a ton of time. When I’m editing a shoot, I like to open one of my favorite images in a series, create a recipe that I LOVE for that series of images, then apply the same processing to all the images in that series. Well, you could save the recipe in RadLab then open RadLab for each image, click the recipe, click finish, and presto, you’ve got it. Pretty slick. But I’m going to show you how to apply the recipe and not even need to open RadLab. It’s quite easy, and once you’ve created the action for one set of images, it’s easy to copy and reuse the action steps to use for future recipes.
Oh, and PS…Totally Rad is one of the awesome sponsors for our He Said She Said Workshop…so we’ve decided to hook you all up! Anybody that registers for our workshop this week (starting today through Sunday, March 18th) will receive a free copy of RadLab…DEAD SERIOUS!!!
So here goes…
| Step 1 – Retouch your image to it’s basic final state (you know, the blemish removal, etc), then make a snapshot (if you’ve never made a snapshot before, it’s basically a snapshot of your current layer stack, if you ever need to get back to where you were, you can click on your snapshot you made, and you’ll be taken back to that state…). To make a snapshot you click on the little camera image at the bottom of your history panel (see image) |  |
| Step 3 – Run RadLab | |
| Step 4 – Save the recipe within RadLab before clicking “Finish”. This step isn’t necessary, but I like to do it anyways just in case I need to refer to it later. Then click “Finish” | |
| Step 5 – Now go to your history panel and click on the snapshot you made earlier. This is going to revert your image back to the state it was in before you changed it to 8-bit and ran RadLab. You’ll notice the Smart Object is gone from your Layer Stack. Don’t panic, we’ll get it back in just a sec . |
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| Step 6 – Now we’re going to start making our action. Start by creating a new “Action Set”. Basically a folder for your new set of actions. I create a new one of these for each client, because depending on the looks we shoot, I’ll sometimes have different recipes for each set of images. PS you can find these icons at the bottom of the actions panel. |   |
| Step 7 – Create a new Action within your new action set, and give it a unique name. Then hit “Record”. |   |
| Step 8 – Now everything you do is going to be recorded in the action until you click the “Stop” button at the bottom of the Actions Panel. |
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| Step 9 – Create a new blank layer by clicking the button at the bottom of your Layers Panel. |  |
| Step 10 – Now you’re going to create a merged copy of your layer stack by clicking Cmd+Opt+Shift+E (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E on a PC). This basically creates a flattened copy of your image and places it at the top of your layer stack. | |
| Step 11 – Convert your new flattened copy to a smart object by right clicking on the layer and choosing “Convert to Smart Object”. |  |
| Step 12 – Now run RadLab from the Filters Menu. This is important! If you run it from the Filters menu, it will start with the settings you used last. |  |
| Step 13 – After clicking finish in the RadLab Panel, click the “Stop” button at the bottom of your actions panel. And Ta Da! Your action is complete! Your action should look like this image… |  |
| Step 14 – Rinse and repeat. You don’t have to recreate the wheel every time you want to create a new recipe. Just copy the whole recipe by holding Option (Alt on a PC) and dragging it to a new action set (or below an action in the same set). Delete the “RadLab” step in the action. Then run the action. Press Record. Run Radlab again with your new recipe. And press “Stop”. You now have a new action for another recipe! |
We had an awesome time in Las Vegas at our first ever workshop on the road! We had a fabulous group of talented attendees, and absolutely loved the weather and environment we had to shoot. OK, it could have been a little warmer on Saturday, but who’s complaining, right? Definitely not this Michigander…can I call myself a Michigander yet, or do I need to marinate a bit longer before I get that privilege? Anyways, workshop was totally cool, loved every minute of it. And to put the cherry on top of an incredible weekend, Jean and I had a the opportunity to be featured on the coolest photography show ever!!! If you haven’t tuned in to Framed yet, you definitely need to check it out…and you just might see some Vegas desert action in the upcoming season .
Sorry, I deviate. Workshop. Awesome! And I’m totally geeked for the announcements we have coming up, so if you’re considering attending one of our upcoming workshops, you won’t want to miss the posts over the next few days!
Finally, here are a few images I shot during the demo portion of the workshop. The demo included some posing and how I work with my subjects, along with some lighting instruction. Here’s Michaela!
So many of you know I’ve been slowly integrating some video into my work, and am absolutely loving the result. It’s added a whole new element to a shoot, and gives so much more feeling to a portrait. Check out a recent shoot I did with my wife (Jean Smith) for a friend of ours named, Cynthia.
If you want to see the full “stills” blog post, pop on over to Jean’s blog HERE.
Here is the second part of the Salem editorial shoot (see Part I). Both models used for this series were phenomenal, and totally brought the look we were looking for. Thanks Rashontae!
It’s been a bit since I’ve updated! Dang Gina! The past couple months have been crazy, and we’re getting stoked for our first big 2012 workshop on the Road…Vegas, here we come!!! The countdown has begun. In about 1 week we’re flying out, and looking forward to seeing everybody that is joining us!
In the mean time, however, here is a glimpse of a (not so) recent shoot I had with Ali in Salem (not the one where they burned the witches).
So you want a free seat to our workshop in Las Vegas? Go checkout the giveaway over at Melissa Davis’ blog, but better hurry, you only have a few days to enter!
