The Official We Shoot Blog
Monday, April 6th, 2020
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While today’s smartphones are modern-day wonders in the incredible
images and videos they can produce, they are no substitute for adjustable,
large-sensor cameras and camcorders with off-camera lighting, and without the
expert editing of each image or video to fit a particular need. Get professionals
like We Shoot to create your images or videos for your marketing!
Cell phone flash going off with resultant flaring! Seattle Commercial Photography by We Shoot. The original high-resolution image is available from us on Alamy, ID # 2BAFPYB. Check out our Alamy portfolio at https://www.alamy.com/portfolio/652516.html .
Monday, August 5th, 2019
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Balcar Monobloc 2 Studio Strobe Control Panel. Seattle Product Photography by We Shoot.
Monday, May 20th, 2019
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Close-up of a Balcar studio strobe reflector used in professional photography. Seattle Commercial Photography by We Shoot.
Monday, June 4th, 2018
The Buzzing of the Saw
Raised with the buzz of the table saw in the garage of my youth, construction is in my blood. I was cutting wood with the circular saw, pounding nails, and leveling ground for the foundation of buildings, alongside my Dad, as far back as I can remember. Eventually, along with my hammer, nails, and plumb bob, a new item appeared in my work belt. A camera. And my transition from carpenter to photographer began. Today, as a professional photographer, a construction photography gene flows through my veins as naturally as rain falls from the Western Washington skies. So when We Shoot was booked for a construction progress shoot this past month, the underlying passion for shooting construction progress coursed again through my veins with the exuberance I felt as a kid working alongside my Dad. Jumping up and down ecstatic!
Driving into Eastern Washington for the shoot, my mind wandered to the many construction progress shoots I’ve enjoyed throughout my career. Construction graveyard-shift shooting at Santa Ana’s John Wayne Airport. Pre-dawn shooting of shotcrete pneumatically sprayed onto the grounds of a construction site in Southern California’s Inland Empire. Commercial video of roads being laid at UC Irvine. And after far too long disconnected from construction progress shooting, our still and video cameras were beckoned by this two-day assignment shooting a cold-storage facility under construction east of the Cascades. And, the excitement for this type of shooting was back!
Forty feet upward the scissor lift transported Gary, me, and the expert pipe welding crew. Up to the roof overlooking the beautiful hills and flatlands of Eastern Washington. Capturing the welders at their craft. Filming the crew in action throughout the cold-storage plant. Shooting the freezer construction in all its engineering majesty. Watching with enraptured eyes the rising of the walls of this new refrigeration facility, soon to be housing the fruit of the nearby farms. Listening with eager ears to the buzz of the circular saws. Oh, it feels great to be back home.
See Gary and me and a little construction in our short video below.
-Dione Benson
We Shoot
A short video from our last industrial construction shoot. Seattle Industrial Photography and Video by We Shoot.
Tuesday, March 15th, 2016
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Macro image of SDHC cards for still and video cameras. Seattle Commercial Photography by 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.
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