The Official We Shoot Blog
Monday, March 28th, 2016
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What goes on behind those doors? Black and white image asks the question. Seattle Commercial Photography by We Shoot.
Monday, March 21st, 2016
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Decrepit shed, decay in progress. Seattle Commercial Photography by We Shoot.
Wednesday, March 16th, 2016
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Weathered architectural image with different building materials. Seattle Commercial Photography by We Shoot.
Tuesday, September 15th, 2015
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The wood and steel of the Bellevue, Washington City Hall are shown in this black and white photograph. Seattle Commercial Photography by We Shoot.
Tuesday, July 14th, 2015
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This orange and yellow building can be found in Shelton, Washington. Architectural photography by We Shoot.
Tuesday, June 16th, 2015
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Looking up at a ceiling in a building by Seattle commercial photographer We Shoot.
Monday, June 8th, 2015
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Framing for a church window under construction by Seattle commercial photographer We Shoot.
Monday, June 24th, 2013
Sometimes it pays to do your homework. Don’t just read the headlines. Several times in the last few years, I have gotten some strange phone calls. One day, late in the afternoon, I got a call on our business line. A woman breathlessly asked, “How late are you open?” I was somewhat taken aback by this, as we are basically location photographers who have a studio, but do most of our work outside of it. We have used the studio for food and small product shooting, but our work is mostly on location: commercial, industrial, large product, and architectural.
So it was surprising to get a call like this, and I said to the person on the other end that we are open 24/7. Whenever a client needs us, we are there. Then the caller said, “Do you have an indoor range?”
I realized that this caller had only read our headline on a search engine, and typed in “Shooting Range” for their search. In the headline, a lot of times, our phone number comes up. So, instead of clicking on the link to get more information, they call our number.
I told the caller that the name of our business is We Shoot, that we are commercial photographers – the only things we shoot are cameras – and that our website is weshoot.com. She sounded a little sheepish and apologized for calling. And, she still hadn’t found a shooting range, which I assumed she was in a hurry to find.
In like respect, when choosing a commercial photographer for a project, see if they are what you are looking for. Many photographers who specialize in weddings also advertise for other types of work. Now, this is not to say that wedding photographers can’t do commercial work, but if you go to their website and the first images you see are wedding related or portraiture heavy, this is what comprises the bulk of their work. You won’t find weddings or portraits on our website. Just because we all use cameras doesn’t make us all the same. So, choose wisely for the type of photography you need – it can save you time and money in the long run. Then you won’t be going off, half-cocked!
– Gary Silverstein
We Shoot
Friday, February 15th, 2013
Product and other forms of commercial photography sometimes require the use of strobes. Strobes usually provide daylight color balance which helps with architectural photography as it allows a burst of light to light up a room, and use a time exposure to get the (daylight) scene outside a window so it looks like we see it. Otherwise, the sunlit exterior is blown out, or in some instances, it can look darker and drearier than the interior, if it is overcast outside. In the case of product, studio strobes are the powerful cousins of your on-camera strobes, and offer many advantages over the smaller units.
First, studio strobes are usually way more powerful, as they use very large batteries, 110v inverters, or wall socket power. Second, they are portable and don’t have to be mounted on the camera, and give a more pleasing look as they don’t “flat-light” the subject and can be made to mitigate heavy shadows. They are designed to work with many different accessories from umbrellas to soft boxes. They can use many different types of wireless triggers. They can generate more than enough light to shoot at tight apertures, allowing for deep depth of field. In product and architecture, I find that shooting with small apertures (f11 to f16) allows me to get everything sharp and in focus. If it is sharp in my original image, I can always create a shallow depth of field look in photo-editing software. However, the reverse is not true. Really soft images cannot be brought back into sharp focus even with the best of software.
All of the studio strobes I have used work with totally manual settings. I usually set my camera on a tripod at f11 to f16 at 1/100th of a second or slower. The strobe light burst lasts for a very short time. This eliminates most movement, but how do I bracket under those conditions, since I don’t want to change either the shutter speed or aperture once I start shooting? The answer is in the manual controls of the studio strobes. Once I get my best-looking exposure of all elements by shooting and rechecking the image, I plan on shooting a series of images bracketed on either side of that exposure by working the slides or dials on my equipment, usually in half-stop increments. I may be using as many as 3 or 4 lights at different angles, and each will need to be adjusted individually for each exposure. This gives me the same object at the same depth of field at the same shutter speed from a dark exposure to an overblown exposure. Why would I want to do this? I can then pick and choose the best exposed parts of the object or room and using an editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop, I assemble them to make a perfectly exposed object with detail where it needs to be without any noise. I can also make an HDR image from all the exposures, if that gets me a better-looking image.
Being a commercial photographer means getting the best satisfactory image for your client. A commercial photographer having the right equipment and expertise means leaving very little to chance.
– Gary Silverstein
We Shoot
We Shoot is a commercial product, food, industrial, and architectural photography team based in the Seattle area.
Thursday, February 16th, 2012
Some years ago, I was emailed by a man who wanted me to photograph a business property. He was a commercial real estate broker with a property to sell. He sent an image he had taken of a rundown business property in our area and wanted to know if we could photograph it. I called him, and we exchanged information. I said I had viewed the image he sent and was curious why he would spend money on getting an image of such a property, to which he replied, “I need a pro to take the image, and then put some lipstick on this pig.” I asked him what he meant. He said he wanted the property to look great and that our photographic ability plus considerable Photoshop editing skills could make winning images. He would be showing the images to a buyer out of state, and he might be able to make a sale on the strength of my images. He wanted me to be complicit in fraud! Once I heard this, there was no way I was having anything to do with such activities, but out of curiosity, I asked him what his budget was for this, and he said he had very limited funds and could only pay about one-fourth of my then day rate. Not only did he have the chutzpa to ask me to commit fraud, even though I wouldn’t have shot and altered the image for profit, he still had the gall to think I would be thrilled to do it at no profit! I hope everyone he called was willing to say no.
Now, I have been asked to enhance properties before, like the time the water truck broke down that was used to wet down a parking lot and I had to make a parking lot look wet for an image. I was also asked before to put two adjacent aerial images together of an airport my partner had taken, and make one photo out of them, and then extend the airport background to look like the drop-off behind the airport had been filled in, and a retaining wall added. This was sort of a photographer’s rendering of what the airport could look like if the airport hired my client to remodel the airport. Another time, a company hired me to take an older aerial image of a building they had built and update it to close to what the building looked like now with landscaping as they couldn’t get another aerial shot. I, of course, went to the building and did extensive work to make a realistic image of the building that I imagined from the air. This image was made into a large print, framed, and hung in the boardroom of the construction company.
In these images in the above paragraph, there was no attempt to defraud anyone. If anyone asks you to do something like this, make sure of what their intentions are. Ask questions. And if someone asks you to “Put lipstick on this pig,” run the other way as fast as you can.
– Gary Silverstein
We Shoot
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