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Wednesday, June 15th, 2016
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The Belltown Stairs in Seattle, WA. Seattle Commercial Photography by We Shoot.
Tuesday, November 10th, 2015
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A path in the woods in Panther Lake, WA. Seattle Commercial Photography by We Shoot.
Wednesday, May 13th, 2015
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Thursday, July 10th, 2014
Like a lot of other people, I go to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and other social sites, and I see lots of images of food. Contacts and colleagues, as well as anonymous strangers, have decided to show what they are about to eat, or have partially eaten. The explosion of cell phone cameras and other low-cost digital cameras has allowed many people to think of themselves as “Food Photographers.” Anyone today with a heartbeat can take a picture. I look at some of the food photography online, and there are comments from others on this, like: “That looks so yummy, I wish I could have some!” Or, “That looks delicious!” I look at the images and it is all I can do to keep my last meal down. What I usually see is not well composed, never styled, improperly lit, and the colors are sickly. This is akin to those blurry, out of focus images some people take of their kids and post on Facebook, to the delight of their friends and grandparents who say “Great shot!” The one thing they all have in common was that all the images were created for free, once you factor out the cost of the phone or camera, memory cards, readers, computers, and editing software. As I create food photography professionally, I have decided to see if I could take decent images of food with my cell phone and run it through Photoshop to get decent looking food shots. Now, real commercial food photography takes planning, a good food stylist, lots of lighting and equipment, and photographic experience. It also takes a tremendous amount of patience. I have dealt with clients, corporate chefs, tight spaces, and less than ideal shooting conditions. Sometimes the food looks great but is actually inedible because things are done to it for the purpose of great photography. I went out to a favorite Mexican restaurant for dinner the other night and, as usual, I brought along my iPhone, which actually has a decent camera built-in (for what it is). It takes 8 megapixel images in .jpg form. It performs reasonably well in relatively low lighting conditions. It has a strobe. But, first, it doesn’t shoot in RAW format. This is important for making better final images. More megapixels means more information and higher enlargement quality. Not all megapixels are equal. There are many cell phones that have larger pixel counts than the iPhone, but the picture quality isn’t as high, as evidenced by the fact that several stock agencies will accept still images and video from iPhones, but not other cell phones. Image noise becomes a factor when jamming high pixel counts on small sensors. For this reason, a cell phone isn’t what a pro would use. If you are going to shoot food, in my opinion, a 24mm X 16mm sensor in a DSLR at 10 megapixels that shoots in RAW format would be the minimum to use. So, despite my opinion, I decided to experiment as a pro since I have indeed been paid to photograph food by people in the food biz. I decided to work with the chips and salsa. The first obstacle is lighting. In this example, we are away from the outside windows and close to an inside wall. I am shooting hand-held. So it has to be either the ambient room lighting or the camera flash. Trying the flash, I get the following image: 
Although it looks sharp as a small image, there is unacceptable camera movement evident in the full-sized version. Harsh shadow at the top of the paper. Loss of light away from the center, and all the color is off. No styling is evident. This was just the way the food was delivered. Yet I see images on FB worse than this with someone saying “yummy” in the comments. I then try the somewhat same shot using room lighting, without the strobe. See the sample image below: 
While in-focus and more appealing color is evident and lighting is more even, the shadows are still way too heavy, caused by non-diffused room lighting. The position of the camera is dictated by my seating. I can’t get far enough back to get the chips and salsa in the frame. The tip of my silverware can be seen at the bottom of the image. Remember that I am shooting as most people do who post images online, not as a pro. There will be no styling. Next, I take the image and put it through a little Photoshop massage. It comes out looking like this: 
With shadows lightened, color enhanced, top of the image straightened, and the silverware tip removed, it looks better – but still nowhere near professional quality. Maybe worthy of FB, but not for marketing. I will show you a styled, professional image we did a while back of two taco salads, chips, and the rest of the fixings: 
As you can see, the color is quite appealing, the image is light and colorful, and the food is crisp and fresh-looking. Shadows are attractive and unobtrusive. The image has been styled by a professional stylist, and a lot of diffused strobe light has been used. Lighting is off-camera to give highlights where needed and provide depth. This is professional food photography – the kind supplied by We Shoot.
– Gary Silverstein
Wednesday, February 20th, 2013
If you have a wifi only iPad you may think you are protected by the Apple “Find My iPad” utility, but you are not. If you lose it, or it is stolen, how will it be recovered? Remember, for the Find My iPad app to work, the iPad has to be signed into the Internet. If you don’t set a password or passcode, it is possible for a thief to go into the settings and shut off Find My iPad. If you do set a password or passcode, it is only possible for the iPad to go online if it is in a place where it has signed into the Internet before, without asking if it should. Otherwise, it remains offline, and Find My iPad can’t find it.
This means that should the police or someone else recover your iPad, they can’t find out how to contact you to say they have it, because they, too, are locked out.
This is how Photoshop or another photo editing tool can help. The iPad allows you to put an image on the lockout screen, other than the one it comes with.
Go into Photoshop and open a new document in the size of the resolution of your screen. In the case of the iPad 4 it is 2048 pixels X 1536 pixels @ 264 pixels per inch. Then add whatever colors you want or add an image as a layer. Next, find the center and use the text tool using the center-justified tool, and put in some text that identifies this iPad as yours. See the example below.
Make something that works for you, and then flatten the image. Save it as a jpeg. I used a quality of 7.
Upload it as an image through iCloud using your Photostream. Go on your iPad and open Photostream. Tap the image and when it gets smaller, tap “edit,” tap the image again so there is a checkmark on the thumbnail, tap “Save to Camera Roll.” Go into the Camera Roll, tap “edit,” tap the thumbnail, tap “share,” and then tap “use as wallpaper.” Now choose “Set Lock Screen.” Turn off your display. Reopen. Your new wallpaper should show the image you just put on your iPad.
Of course, you can do this with your 3G or 4G iPhones and iPads as well.
This way, if some thief steals your iPad and can’t break the passcode or password, anyone he or she shows it to knows it has been stolen. If it is lost, someone who finds it will be able to get in touch with you, or if the police have it, they will be able to contact you.
While not perfect, it should help you hold onto your iPad or maybe get it back.
– Gary Silverstein
We Shoot
We Shoot is a commercial product, food, industrial, and architectural photography team based in the Seattle area.
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.
Wednesday, January 16th, 2013
In my last post, I discussed bracketing of exposures. Today, let’s talk about bracketing with hot lights. Hot lights are a continuous lighting source and should be regarded as available light, just sometimes very intense, and very bright. A majority of hot lights are of incandescent color temperature, adding a warm or yellow tone to your image. In most modern DSLRs, there is a setting for tungsten or incandescent light which compensates for the warm tint by adding a blue or cyan tint to the image.
Instead of using the incandescent mode in the camera for white balance, I prefer taking one exposure with a gray card in the image and setting the gray reading for all the images I take in that series with my editing software. Outdoors, my cameras are very accurate, so the automatic white balance setting works just fine. Indoors with a mix of lighting, a gray card or an Expodisk is the ticket.
Now, back to bracketing with available light and hot lights. My cameras will do up to nine bracketed shots (different exposures of the same image) automatically. Some cameras only allow three images for auto bracketing. If you desire more exposures for either HDR (High Dynamic Range) images or for layering the images with these cameras, the way to facilitate that is to do it manually. As in my last article, adjust the exposure by putting the camera in aperture-priority mode, setting one aperture and changing the shutter speed to bracket various exposures. My choice is to use 2/3 of a stop difference for each of my brackets. You may like 1/3 stop, 1/2 stop, 1 stop, or ? bracketing stops instead. If doing this manually, try to get one optimum exposure, i.e. the one picked by the camera as the overall best exposure, and make the same number of exposures brighter and darker on either side of the optimum exposure. Also, if doing it manually, you will have to put the camera on full manual for exposure, then set your aperture where you want and vary the time for the brackets.
The reason for bracketing is that the latitude for digital images is about 5 stops with detail and no digital “noise.” When lightening darker areas in a digital image, one sometimes runs into noise, either color noise which looks likes flecks of red, green, and/or yellow in that area, or luma noise, which looks like flecks of black snow. Noise is usually unacceptable in commercial work and for stock images. The answer is to bracket and take images in which even shadow areas are light enough to have detail without the need to lighten them, and to blend them into the finished image, either with HDR or layering and masking in computer-editing software. Conversely, blown-out areas of one image can be recovered from a darker bracketed image, and give detail to blown-out areas.
In summary, bracketing with available lighting or with hot lights is basically the same, and white balance should be checked and adjusted should the need arise.
-Gary Silverstein
Monday, October 1st, 2012
In the days of film, a professional commercial photographer had to be very careful of the backgrounds that would be used in his/her images. Retouching was expensive. Shooting an item for use against another background from the one it was taken with could be a labor-intensive multi-step process. A spot on a high-key (pure white) background could be touched out on the negative, and a nightmare undertaking on a transparency. Today, of course, images are taken digitally and manipulated by editing programs, like Photoshop. One of our most recent shoots involved large, heavy industrial products. In film-days past, we would have probably used a seamless white background to shoot the product and spent a lot of time with product placement. The items to be photographed were round, between two and three feet in diameter, and each weighed 500 or more pounds. Five views were to be taken of each. That means that either the item would have to be moved on the background, or very carefully lifted by a hoist onto the background. We would have to be careful of marks left by the items where they rested on the paper, and some method of keeping such round items from rolling off the surface would have to be employed and kept out of sight.
So, pre-planning for the shoot is still important, even in this digital world. We opted to not use any type of manufactured background per se, but to only use white reflectors in strategic places to reflect light or add a highlight where we desired. Not using a background simplified the lighting somewhat in that a roll of paper or fabric didn’t block out the light from behind each item. We were going to photograph the items in the factory environment with the idea that we would isolate the image in Photoshop, and put it on another, more desirable background.
Lighting was done with our powerful studio strobes, and the modeling lights on the strobes gave us an idea of how the lighting would look in the finished image. We shot with soft-boxes to give a square look to our lighting in the highlights, as umbrellas just wouldn’t cut it here as these products were light-reflective. We planned to keep the camera stationary, move the lights as necessary, and rotate the product for the five different angles the customer required. Since the objects were circular, and we wanted to keep all the images the same size, we had to plan how to keep that proportionality. Think of a coin stood on edge. The widest the image would have to be is a little more than the diameter when one of the faces of the coin is toward you. When the edge of the coin is nearer to you, the size of the image could change, but we wanted to make them all the same size for the client’s ease of putting together several views of their product. Also, we had to be far enough away to assure depth of field when we were shooting the views that showed part of the object furthest away. Editing programs have great sharpening utilities, but a severely out-of-focus image cannot be brought back. You can easily blur parts of a sharp image and make it look good if needed for the effect, but the reverse isn’t the case. So all this had to be figured out in advance.
Now, let’s go on to the backgrounds for the images. Since the area or table on which the items were shot was in a fixed location, the background for each image (as produced by the camera) would have been a toolbox and other parts of the assembly plant. So we made it so that we and our client could “lift” the item off the background and put it on any other background or even a video. This is done by means of a “clipping path.” This is a very labor-intensive process. It means that I use a Photoshop tool to painstakingly trace out every edge of the product at anywhere from a 100% to a 300% enlargement. Once I have outlined every hole, edge, and cranny, I “select” the item alone and make a layer of it to put on other backgrounds. I include this clipping path with the image, so the client is able to do the same. Now, you may ask why I do so much work, as some of the editing programs have become pretty sophisticated and make an easier selection with other, faster tools. Well, the answer is this: I have used these editing tools, and sometimes there are errors in the program choosing what is part of the item and what is not. It may not be noticeable on a small jpeg on a website, but it will stick out like a sore thumb on a 30X40 enlargement at a trade show. That is what separates a pro from an amateur. Below are an original view of one of the products, and a few different backgrounds that I feel work well. Each background below was created in Photoshop, but other backgrounds could be used, as well. Remember that whichever one a client chooses, I include the clipping path so they can put it against another background if that is their need.
As you can see, the product image looks at home with any of the backgrounds. Keep this in mind as you plan your next shoot.
– Gary Silverstein
Monday, July 19th, 2010
A couple of months ago, a bit of new technology for editing images was announced. Adobe Photoshop CS5 was available for purchase. At the moment, I have CS4. Previously, I used CS2. I usually skip one iteration of the program to justify the expense and pain of buying and installing it. However, the newest version has something called “content aware” that, if it works as advertised, will be a great time saver and make my life easier.
I am usually able to upgrade at an affordable price, as I spent what I considered a lot of money some years ago, buying the program at full price. Adobe allows upgrades to go way back. They still even allow you to upgrade from CS2 at the same low price at which I am able to buy it. Some people look to get pirated versions of this program to get a lower price. My advice is: don’t do it. Adobe has figured out how to make the real program inoperative without legacy key numbers and a new key number to unlock the program. Buy from a reputable seller. Amazon may be reputable, but every seller on Amazon may not be.
No matter how much technology costs, we all have to deal with it to get the job done. I felt the one new feature was worth the money it cost to upgrade, as well as it having several other attributes.
One complaint by professionals on a retouching forum on the ‘net is basically, “There goes the neighborhood,” about the relative ease the new program adds to retouching, allowing amateurs to retouch with aplomb. Don’t be too dismayed. There still is a barrier to entry. The cost for the full program at Adobe is close to $700.00 USD. Even if somebody can afford to buy the program, it doesn’t make them a Photoshop expert and know how to get the most out of it. Many who have it don’t know how to really use it. However, these people tend to give the work away, and it affects the price true pros can charge for their work.
Frequently, I am told, “I need it yesterday.” Clients seem to wait until the last possible minute before contacting a photographer. I therefore want to make it so I can turn the work out faster and easier to meet that challenge.
So, if you want to call yourself a professional, you have to buy into it. It may mean doing without something else in order to stay current. Less lattes can mean more Photoshop or more computer memory. I am not talking about some secret weapon that will let you get a jump on the competition, but to stay even. It may be fun, but more often, it is a business decision needed to get the work out.
-Gary Silverstein
Monday, June 28th, 2010
“The Shoot From Hell,” said one of my assistants, in reference to shooting the electronic control panel housed in brushed stainless steel. Brushed stainless is no shiny brass doorknob to shoot, see previous blog post “Reflecting on Reflections, Part 2,” but it is definitely something difficult. The unit (see images below) is a rather large, oblong-shaped, heavy electronic control panel with three red LED read-out screens which were as reflective as a mirror, housed inside of a brushed stainless steel shell, which was also quite reflective.
The brushed stainless, unlike the doorknob, won’t show my countenance, but will show all lights, colors, and dark areas surrounding it. Any light that is not broad, whether a room light, a window, or the reflected light off our clothing, shows up as a blurry, colored reflection blob. The size of the unit makes it difficult to isolate easily. Many different exposures were made to control where lights sat, where reflectors were aimed, and where the assistants and I were situated.
Each setup or position of the unit was accompanied by moving lights and camera and adjusting everything many times. My assistant who muttered the “From Hell” phrase, is himself a good photographer who eschews lighting and strobes to create images. He mostly likes to shoot with available light. He said it would drive him crazy trying to photograph things like this for a living. I, on the other hand, view it as a challenge.
Finally, when I finished shooting the product, many hours were spent retouching and enhancing the images. I then submitted the images to my client as low-res jpegs over the ‘net, and we worked together choosing the background for the images he liked. See the images below.
While reflective objects present a challenge, make sure your attitude toward them is not defeatist. This is difficult shooting to say the least. Hard work and determination is the hallmark of anyone trying to get this done.
One last word on this kind of shoot. It does not lend itself to using a point-and-shoot camera with the flash on the camera. For the most part, it has certain minimum requirements of a good DSLR camera, and sufficient off-camera lighting and lighting equipment. Otherwise, the results will be unsatisfactory and amateurish.
– Gary Silverstein
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