from shooting the other week...

Darik Bernard was a star in this one - his very first time modeling for fashion. I must say he did an amazing job - we'll see good things from this actor!

 

We did a few concepts, this one (above), of course - is my favorite :).

More to come, this is just a preview..

Have a fantagraphic weekend~

Back to sunsets

Is it just me, or does winter offer much more beautiful sunsets and sunrises? Spent so much time in warmer weather trying to catch that beauty, but it never seems to be good enough, unless scenics offer something interesting and photoshop is heavily involved afterward.

But in winter - when I care less to get out and hold on to freezing metal of the tripod for an hour... it's almost every single one of them - worth taking pictures of!

Just one of them here... wasn't there with a tripod, but at least was THERE to witness it :)

Just a little bit of processing to pull out shadows - the light did it all! Very windy it was I remember...

The importance of good STILLS for your film

Everyone seems to be making films these days, but not everyone has a professional photographer on their development team, and most people don't know why they should consider hiring one at all.

A lot of people end up clipping stills right from the video, and the quality of those is never close to even a medium-end point-and-shoot camera. Composition rules, light sensitivity, camera capabilities, lenses - these things vary between video and photo.


When you build up an interest among buyers and apply to festivals, the material that you have to give out better be high quality too. What people see about the film, what things are printed on and how it is presented speaks a lot about the producer and the film itself. Images need to be as attractive as possible, full of energy and tell a story to the person that looks at them.

Attractive posters, flyers, postcards, t-shirts, behind the scenes shots - all of that helps you create the interest even before the screening begins. After screening you want people to take home things that will remind them of your film.

Festivals count on someone who has good give away items to support the film promotion campaign and they will remember you better. They will also include them in press gatherings and screenings that happen before the event itself and you know what that can do for your film.

Posters. POSTERS. POSTERS!!!

Posters attract attention. Even if you don't stop to look at them, your eyes send the information to the brain and when they see the name or something familiar about your film - they will say - I heard about this one! Someone overhearing it is automatically referred to check it out. Buzz is created when something about your movie is present in their brains. No poster - no buzz.
You can ask local store owners to hang posters in their windows, leave cards on their tables - these materials better look appealing! People need to pay to see your film before they see it, not after...

Anything you want to add? Let me know :)...

I'll be putting together some behind the scenes photos from one of the film projects I've been working on. These things are not only full of lots of waiting around, and you'll see why~

Stay tuned!

Wine project continued...

Here's a little more of the ongoing project that I'm trying to tackle in my free time - take a nice shot of the glass with red wine.
The one on the left is as taken, and one on the right is same shot - post-processed. Inside the glass is a mix of different juices. Cran-grape-raspberry I think *lol*.

I tried making it look like wine as much as I can AND have a nice consistent transparency at the same time, but that's as far as I've come yet.

As you can see the mix is somewhat foggy.

I love learning about it all a bit by bit. The project seemed trivial at first, but now I'm just into shooting more and more glass and other (semi-) transparent things to see what effects I achieve, when and why.

The end of the wonderful day...

What seemed to be a slow starting day ended up very productive and satisfying. The future goals become more and more clear with every experience and new client - that makes me feel very comfortable!

Got to post-production for an old project of mine - old and dry Japanese maple tree leaves - the tree is very young, but the leaves I think are small on big trees too, and when they fall off and crumble.... you can observe a completely different side to them - they become like these little hands and what not! I found so many interesting shapes among them - will never go through all of them here in photoshop! Might make quite an exciting collection actually - with the right processing... *thinks*

This was actually inspired by somebody - of course with my own twist to it, hope you enjoy :).
They made me feel like no dead thing is actually ever dead, it's just in my mind, if I'm allowing it to - it dies. And by it's own, it's just a thing, it's neutral. So I choose to see it as a living thing!

One more...

May be I'll get to do more of these sometime in the future, enough for now, got to deliver photos that are "sponsored" ;)

Wine glass project continued...

Here's another setup. I was looking to achieve something different, especially interested in the transparency of the liquid. Again, a good red wine doesn't give that to you, gotta dilute it! Which I did in the next photo :) (coming up...)

Are you willing to take action?..

I wanted to share this story - it's quite simple, and doesn't give any extra points to me, but I feel that I should lay it out here.

I was driving a friend some place here in New Jersey. Had my son with us in the back too. Can't remember where exactly we were going...
Don't remember why I was so distracted that day either - may be it had to do with the fact that I wasn't very used to the new car yet, but on one of the lights on Route 10 (the first one in bunch of cars lined up at the intersection waiting for green signal) - we got stuck.  The car engine seemed to have just "died". Light was already green, I tried starting the car and the engine went ON, but died again almost immediately. A lot of annoyed drivers behind me (thank god it was a 2 or 3 lane road *lol*) beeping and cursing... me breaking a sweat... little boy in the back quite displeased - something was clearly wrong and the noise the cars behind us were making - got him very anxious.

That's when I remembered that I wanted to stop at the gas station that morning, but, apparently - among thousands of things daily occupying my mind - simply forgot.

Oops.

I explained to my friend what happened, we got out of the car and started pushing it to the curb. We needed to cross the intersection and push it up to the small parking lot near the flower shop. New Jersey in that area is somewhat hilly, and the parking was higher than the road. I didn't notice when this guy and some police officer joined us in our efforts, they told me - just "drive" it towards there, we'll push it. When that was accomplished, the guy (his name was Chris, that's all I know about him) told us to wait there, he'll go and get us some gas so we could drive to the station and fill it up. 15 minutes later he was back, with a small gas tank (which by the way I went to store and bought later that week, just for a situation like that).

He refused to take any money that my friend was offering him. Explained that he was in the same situation just a few months ago, and that was the reason he had that little gas tank in the car with him.

I took it all somewhat for granted.. no-no, I rrrreeeeeaaally appreciated what he did for us!!! But my friend - he was absolutely fascinated that someone bothered to stop and help out like that - he seemed completely taken by surprise! He mentioned a few times later that day how he couldn't believe there are people like Chris. And with those words I felt bad for the world. But at the same moment there was born hope. As with everything that's going on not to our liking - there's always more and more hope being born :)