The Official We Shoot Blog
Monday, January 29th, 2018
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4″ X 5″ Large Format Camera And Accessories. Seattle Commercial Photography by We Shoot.
There was a time when we used this camera to shoot commercial work here at We Shoot. There was nothing automatic, the media was 4″ X 5″ transparencies and negatives, and the image viewed at the back of the camera was upside down and backward. The image quality from equipment like this was very high. The workflow and equipment has changed, but high quality is still our standard.
Monday, December 21st, 2015
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The view of Bellvue from the City Hall. Seattle Commercial Photography by We Shoot.
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2015
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An aerial view of the Port of Olympia, Washington by Seattle commercial photographer We Shoot. The State Capitol Building is in the background.
Monday, July 20th, 2015
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Aerial view of the Port of Olympia by Seattle Commercial Photographer We Shoot.
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Without a doubt, the hardest single thing I ever photographed was, of all things, something so ubiquitous that we handle them every day. I am talking about door knobs. Plain, highly reflective, brass doorknobs. Now, why is it so hard to photograph a doorknob? Well, it becomes a lot more difficult when there are some rules. Rules like one would run into with a doorknob manufacturer looking for someone to shoot images of their products for promotions. Do you think they want a reflected image of a happy, smiling distorted photographer looking out from their new brochure at the viewer? How about seeing that photographer’s camera and tripod, or the space the doorknob happens to be in? Simple, inexpensive, plain, highly polished brass doorknobs become painful to contemplate as a product photographer. They not only are spherical and reflect the entire world around them, they have a backing plate made of the same stuff, that will reflect things that exist behind the knob, from the reflection on the back of the knob.
Several years ago, we had spoken with a potential client, the marketing department head at a large manufacturer of doorknobs, hardware, and faucets about working for her company. She said she had several photographers she used for shooting these products, but she said she would send us a sample of their products so that we could submit a test photograph to show that we could handle this type of photography, in case she needed our services. Parameters for shooting this product were clear. Shoot it on a 4″X 5″ transparency, and no retouching of any kind was permitted. She said they did any retouching needed at the graphics department at the manufacturer.
About 5 days later, the product arrived by UPS. There was a plain brown cardboard box inside the outer package. I opened it up and beheld a photographic nightmare. It was an inexpensive, highly-polished brass doorknob set, complete with keys.
It reflected everything! It saw me, the room, everything in the room, and to my horror, the backing plate re-reflected everything the back of the knob “saw.” I knew this was to be a fight. I looked at images of doorknobs in advertising. They looked perfect. Some were “brushed” metal – not polished, but still shiny. Some were dull finished, and just reflected highlights. The polished ones stood out. No reflections of photographers, cameras, tripods, rooms, etc. I assumed that there was some reflection of a camera lens somewhere during the taking of the image, as there was no way to avoid the reflection from the angle presented. A different angle may have allowed one to position the lens where the reflection would be positioned over the keyhole, but you can’t shoot there for different angles. The first problem includes camera, tripod and photographer reflections. One way to avoid this taking up a lot of room on the doorknob is to make a blind out of white material, like foam core, and cut a hole through which the camera lens “sees” the doorknob.
Although this cuts down on untoward reflections, it still reflects the lens and the hole, unless the hole is dark and tight around the lens. I figured this made for a minimum of retouching at the graphics department, and would be acceptable. A second consideration was the lighting. Lights or hot spots show up on the product itself and a smooth highlight with no hot spots would be a better solution. Everything I tried did not work! As said before, putting a piece of foam core in front of the doorknob cut down reflections, but I thought that aiming lights from behind the doorknob and bouncing the light toward the white foam core blind would produce the effect without bad reflections. I was wrong. The strobe “soft boxes” reflected into the back side of the door knob and re-reflected off the backing plate. I had distorted oblong light reflections staring at me from the backing plate.
It became evident there must be a way to do this. I tried white sheets, but the lights created hot spots, and it reflected any corners and folds. I had seen a shooting tent at my local pro camera store, and headed down there next. A tent like this was used to evenly light small products and I thought this was the ticket. It cost $250.00 plus tax. I got the tent home, and assembled it. It was made of a translucent white fabric, meant to diffuse the light inside. It also was rigid and had seams and a rigid frame inside the fabric which showed up in the reflections. It had several holes for camera placement, and try as I might with stuff to cover them, they showed up, too. Fortunately, I was able to return the tent for a refund as it really didn’t do the job.
I even talked to man who owned a company that made plastic blister packs in Santa Barbara. I drove out to Santa Barbara to get a prototype dome of a transparent, but clouded plastic that he was thinking of producing. It took out most of the distracting reflections, but reflected the cloudy nature of the dome and made the doorknob appear dull and not highly reflective. I sent it back to Santa Barbara with a thank you note and a description of the effect.
I finally built a box enclosure of translucent white plastic, got what I thought was a good image and sent that to the marketing manager. She said to keep the doorknob, and she would call us if she needed us. Last I heard, she was working for another company doing something completely different. She never called!
Below is the image I created, after scanning it and retouching it for our portfolio. Shiny, reflective doorknobs are tough. Try it if you doubt me.
– Gary Silverstein
Doorknob with minimal reflections - click on image to enlarge
Thursday, June 17th, 2010
I work and live in the great Pacific Northwest. The area from Seattle through Tacoma and Olympia, Washington to Portland, Oregon is generally where you will find me. The features that stand out around here are views with a mountain in them. Whether it is Mt. Rainier, Mt. Saint Helens, Mt. Adams, Mt. Baker, or another of those monoliths that dominate the scenery, sometimes they are far enough away to get aerial haze clouding the images. Consequently, if the image is light enough for great detail in the foreground of the image, the mountain will appear so light as to almost disappear from the image. Here are some ways to fix this: all involve the use of editing software of some kind, but the results can be worth it. See the two samples below.
There are many ways to get this to come out in one image. If you are using raw software, you can make two different tiff images from the same raw file. Manipulate one tiff so that the foreground comes out with the proper density and color, and edit the other version to be much darker, with more contrast and saturation. Name them differently so you can bring them both up in your editing software. Copy the lighter image to the darker one as a layer. You can use the following editing program operations to edit the image.
I prefer the following method over the one outlined above, mainly because it allows retouching of the image as one image, rather than dealing with layering two different unretouched images. First, open your image in your editing program – the one I currently use is Adobe Photoshop CS4. Next, retouch and enhance the image as necessary. Next, make a duplicate layer. Save the newly-layered file as a separate psd file. Click the eyeball symbol next to the upper layer to make it invisible, and move to the lower layer to work on it. There are several ways to darken the bottom layer. I prefer using adjustment layers like curves, levels, saturation, etc., to get this done. Once the mountain looks sufficiently dense enough to appear stronger in the image, I click on the eyeball spot again to again make the upper layer visible. I then create a mask for the upper image. I sometimes take the pen tool and trace out the mountain to select it by itself, making a path that will become a selection, but in any event, I use a black brush to paint out part of the upper layer and allow the lower layer to show through to some degree, or even 100%. If I think it needs more tweaking, I sometimes make a “soft light” layer above all the rest of the layers and darken appropriate areas. Once I am satisfied, I flatten the layers and resave it in a “retouched” folder with the same number. As you can see by the images above, it makes the mountain stand out, and it looks better than what the camera recorded to begin with.
– Gary Silverstein
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