H&M plops real heads on CGI bodies.

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This morning, BoingBoing posted this article about clothing retailer H&M’s decision to create several ads using real model’s heads on the same computer-generated body.  My first thought, besides of course lamenting this newest nail in photography’s coffin, was to wonder why they stopped there.  It’s easy to imagine that the next step will be to generate the heads as well, and that reality can’t be too far off.

It could be that this won’t bother many people, but I personally find it more than a little disturbing that these lines between reality and fantasy are not just blurred but increasingly erased.  Even beautiful people are commonly rendered unrecognizable as their former selves, and have been for quite some time—just check out this wildly popular Dove video from several years ago if you’d like to see the process.  Don’t you think any clear-headed person, at least anyone untainted by a marketing degree, would agree that the photo of the woman looks amazing without the Photoshop treatment?  I won’t get into it too much, but it’s my opinion we’d be a healthier society if marketers allowed for the use of “real” people in advertisements and presented a realistic body image to the public at large.  It’s a fruitless argument—that’s not where we are and we seem inexorably headed in the opposite direction—but I think it’s the right one.

The New Place

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My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.  After months of searching, I have at long last found a new studio space.  It’s not far from the old studio, actually—just a couple blocks from Seattle’s iconic Pike Place Market—and it’s similar in character to the old building but without the baggage of fatal structural flaws.  I’m expecting to sign lease papers next week and move in at the beginning of December, and I can’t wait to share more details and images once it’s been fixed up.  More to come…

Washington State Senator Scott White, 1970-2011

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I just learned that this past Friday, Washington State Senator Scott White suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 41.  I am terribly sorry to hear the news.  I didn’t know him well, but what little I knew, I liked very much.  He really didn’t seem like a politician to me—there was nothing about him that came across as even remotely artificial—he just seemed like a regular guy who wanted to do what he could to make a positive difference.

I met Senator White at the end of 2009, when he was still a House Representative and I was asked to photograph him for an article about legislation he was proposing.  It was a bill that would make crimes against the homeless qualify as “bias-motivated attacks”, or hate crimes.  I photographed him under an I-5 overpass in Seattle, at the site of a homeless man’s murder that inspired his work on the issue.  It was a typical wet day.  I remember apologizing for asking him to stand in mud for the shoot, but he couldn’t have been happier to do it and he was glad to give me all the time I needed.  It was his nature to smile, I think—I asked him to keep a serious expression due to the nature of the bill highlighted in the article, but I could tell he found it difficult.

Since then, we bumped into each other several times at community functions.  The first time was quite a while after we shot together, and I didn’t even expect him to remember me, much less take the time to talk with me (there were plenty of people there more important than I).  But he came over and struck up a conversation, asked how things were, and told me that the article was up in his office, along with my photograph.  I asked him about the fate of the bill, and congratulated him on its passage.  I remember feeling glad that he was in Olympia, and it saddens me to think we’ve lost him.

Amitav Ghosh

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55-year-old Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh is so boyish, soft-spoken, and downright unassuming that you’d never guess he’s a literary powerhouse.  But it’s true—with seven novels under his belt and more works of non-fiction, Ghosh has served as a literary professor at both Queens College and Harvard University.  The man is so good, in fact, that he was awarded the $1M Dan David Prize, which he shared with the one and only Margaret Atwood.  I’m far less eloquent, so I’ll just quote one of the judges for the prize, who lauded Ghosh’s work as “distinguished equally by its precise, beautifully rendered depictions of characters and settings, and by its sweeping sense of history unfolding over generations against the backdrop of the violent dislocations of peoples and regimes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”  I don’t doubt that that’s true.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ghosh recently when I was asked to photograph him for an article.  I wish we had more time (I only had about five minutes with the man), but it’s like they say—if wishes and buts were clusters of nuts, we’d all have a bowl of granola.  I’m quite happy with the results, and I’m not complaining.

How to create a self-portrait that makes you look much tougher than you are.

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I recently undertook a personal project, and I’m thrilled enough with the results that I thought I’d share some what went into making the image.  The photo came about because I wanted something new to use on the contact page on my website, something that would tie in well with a terrible pun.  This was the idea I came up with—a fight club sort of scenario, where I look beat to hell but somehow still victorious.  Like a bad-ass.

Step One: Get into shape.
I’ve never worked out in my life.  It’s never been a priority, so while I’ve always been thin (thanks, mom and dad), I’ve never looked like a street fighter before.  I wasn’t sure what I was in for, how long it would take to accomplish, or even exactly how to do it.  I wasn’t going to join a gym—nuts to that—and I wasn’t going to have a personal trainer.  No, I decided I could figure it out on my own.  Turns out, it’s super easy!  Yeah, all I had to do was run nearly every day for about a month, complete thousands of crunches, push-ups, and pull-ups, drink untold gallons of water, and quit alcohol, sugar, and all other foods I hold dear.  So, yeah.  Super easy.  I’d say it was a piece of cake, except I had to cut out cake, too.

Step Two: Visualize the photo.
With the hard part out of the way, I just thought about what I wanted the final shot to look like.  When you’re layering images, you need the camera angle, focal length, and lighting between the two photos to match as much as possible.  If they don’t, the photo is going to look fake, so everything has to be mapped out and planned ahead of time.  I decided on backlighting to get some hard rim lights on the crowd and myself, and a lower camera angle for that larger-than-life sort of feel.  I will often draw up a storyboard, even though I’m rubbish as an artist.  It just helps me understand better what I need for the shoot by way of location, lighting and other equipment, and in this case, models.


Awesome, right?  My career as a sketch artist never took off, but I still manage to get ideas on paper.

Step Three: Studio shoot.
I wanted some good makeup—black eye, bloody nose and eyebrow, torn chest, lots of sweat—so I enlisted the help of the terrifically talented Seattle makeup artist Lindsey Watkins.  We talked back and forth and swapped graphic images of brutally beaten people (totally fun in a sort of sick way), and settled on the look below.  I really couldn’t have been happier.  She’s some kind of sorceress, and great to work with.
There are certain considerations to address when doing this kind of thing.  When you know you’ll be cutting the subject out of a studio shot for compositing purposes, as is the case here, it behooves you (or whoever is doing your post work) to shoot on a background color that will make it—well, maybe not easy, but easier.  In this instance, because the background image would be very dark (in fact black in many parts) and because the rim lights would make my outline so bright and well-defined, I figured shooting on a solid black background would make it easiest when it came time to cut myself out of the picture.  If you’ll take a look at the image below, you’ll see what I mean.
Personally, I don’t think self portraiture is ever particularly easy, but if you shoot tethered to the computer it’s certainly less difficult.  Canon’s shooting software saves a lot of headache, and makes for a much smoother shoot.  Run over and hit the timer every time?  No fun.  Try to hide a remote in your hand?  No need.  Make your assistant do it?  No, thank you, Josh.  You can actually ask the computer to tell the camera to shoot every so often until you have as many frames as you want.  And if you ask it nicely, that’s exactly what it will do.

Step Four: Location shoot.
There are a lot of fences in town.  I wanted a batting cage because I thought it would fit in perfectly with that ultimate fighting, cage match sort of look.  Parks would have had them, but I didn’t want to contend with the public.  Inquisitive bystanders, obnoxious drunks, and the like are so distracting.  You can deal with them if you have to, but why would you choose to?  I was shooting in the evening, so I narrowed my search to schools.  I reasoned they would have such apparatus and be unattended at night.  After a bit of scouting, I found this perfect spot.

I was giddy.  It had everything I was looking for, including a cage shape, plenty of space behind for models and lights, and a great weathered look.  I very politely asked in the school’s office for permission to use the area—good thing, too, because I was visited during the shoot by a concerned maintenance man—and they very graciously said yes.  After the shoot, I returned with a thank-you of some apple walnut muffins I’d made.  We photographers are denied permission a fair amount (we seem to be suspect, I guess?), so I believe responses in the affirmative are to be appreciated.  Apparently, photographers need to engender some goodwill, and I’m happy to do it.  With muffins.
The shoot itself was a lot of fun.  I put out a call for my friends and their friends to come out if at all possible (Facebook has to be good for something), and promised them pizza (tax deductible) for their efforts.  In the end, I had more people than I could reasonably use—always preferable to the alternative.  I had them jumping and screaming and shouting, all in a residential neighborhood (right before the noise ordinances kicked in, of course), and they were able to enjoy the food after just about fifteen minutes in front of the camera.

Step Five: Photoshop.
The most significant Photoshop work done to the image was the darkening of the faces in the crowd.  I wanted their features to be only very barely visible, and not at all distracting.  I also removed the small sign in the center of the fence (you can see it in the photo above), and did a little dodging and burning where I thought it was necessary.  The studio shot, as you can see, was left pretty much as shot.  I was careful to keep all the hair as I stripped away the background (Photoshop CS5′s “Refine Mask” tool is a hell of a thing), but aside from the extraction, I mostly left the image alone.  If you compare the shot above to the final image, you’ll see I did a little dodging and burning here and there, but nothing major.  After dropping the self portrait onto the location shot and positioning and sizing it appropriately, I processed the whole image overall in a way that I liked.  Done and done.

The final image.  I have since enjoyed a lot of pie.

So long, 619 Western, and thank you.

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Yesterday the last furniture was removed and the last considerable dust bunnies were swept away from my studio space in the 619 Western building in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square district.  It was a sad day for me, and knowing it was coming didn’t help very much.  I didn’t expect to be there forever, I suppose, but who ever wants to leave a place they love only because there’s no other choice?  The city of Seattle and the Washington State DOT made that decision for me, and the scores of other artists in the building.  October 1st, 2011, that’s it.  Out.  If you missed the story and are at all curious as to why everyone was evicted, you can read about it here.

How can I tell you how I feel about the building?  Now more than a century old, 619 Western is all cement and wood and there’s not an ornate element to be found, but more than a hundred artists made that building their home away from home.  It was a vibrant and exciting community for artists of all kinds—painters, dancers, musicians, sculptors, woodworkers, clothing designers, and of course photographers—to say nothing of the city’s many artgoers.  An arts building since 1979 (the year I was born, coincidentally), it was also one of the largest art studio enclaves on the west coast.  It was, in fact, so magnificent in so many respects that it frankly made no difference to any of us that it was crumbling (I often likened it to a scone).  619 was an incredibly special place, and I can’t really express how fortunate I feel to have been a part of it for the last five years of its life.  I suspect Seattle’s art community will be feeling its loss for quite some time.  I know I will.

I’ll get to photos in just a minute, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the thing I’ll likely miss most about 619 Western.  On the first Thursday of each month, anyone and everyone could come out and enjoy work displayed in galleries and studios throughout downtown.  Other buildings were open those nights (and will continue to be), but 619 was absolutely, no question, hands down the place to be.  The monthly event was called ArtWalk, and 619′s stairs, hallways, and studios were always packed with people there to enjoy art.  You know, to be honest, given all the fire codes no doubt broken every time, I’m surprised the city never shut it down (seriously, if there had been an electrical short—not outside the realm of possibility at all—those that didn’t die in the fire would’ve certainly perished in the inevitable stampede on the only available set of stairs).
Artwork, music, wine, great friends, strangers, laughter, conversation, connection—I’ve never been in the middle of anything like it.  I will miss it terribly, and I’ll always have a warm place for it in my heart, right between thunderstorms and The Princess Bride.

Okay, photos.

This used to be my home away from home.  A lot of really wonderful things happened here.

A century of wear from a century of feet.

This crack in the cement is four or five inches wide.  Through it you can see into the north half of the building.  It’s not the only one—in fact, these cracks are so common throughout 619 that they were incorporated into the building’s logo (see above).  Unsafe, schmunsafe.

I always loved the back entrance.

Moments from an ArtWalk night.  Not the busiest we’ve ever had, but this was the night I set up the camera.

So long, 619 Western, and thank you.

lucienknuteson.com (v3.0)

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What a great way to kick off a new year.  New work, new website.  If you haven’t already seen it—if you didn’t come here from the main site—have a gander.  It’s a pretty smart design, and I’m very glad to say you’re able to view the images much larger than was possible before (up to full screen size, if you click that little doohickey in the lower right).  I hope you’ll have a look, and that you’ll like it as much as I do.  As always, feel free to let me know what you think.

lucienknuteson.com is dead.
Long live lucienknuteson.com!

I wonder if David LaChapelle’s work sounds like a Lady Gaga album.

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Ever wonder what a photograph sounds like?  If so, you can feed it through Photosounder, a program that (among many other things) lets you create new sounds using photographs or fractals.  Kind of cool.  I wonder if Joel-Peter Witkin‘s photos sound like the fruitless screams, gnashing teeth, and searing flesh of a million tortured souls…

(For those who aren’t familiar, Witkin is kind of a controversial figure.  You probably won’t want to click his name up there if you’re at all disturbed by photographs of cadavers, disembodied human parts—including heads—and physically deformed people.  Personally, I really don’t care for his work, but feel free to see how you feel about it.  Ya been warned.)

Brand Aid

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I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to my friend and colleague Michael Clinard, who has been working hard at retooling his brand and website this past year.  Check out the results at his new site and blog, and when you’re through there, have a look at some of the attention he’s been getting in the blogosphere of Chase Jarvis and Rob Haggart.  Kudos to you, Mike, and keep up the good work.

Hey, Let Me Shill Something Really Quick…*

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I’ve mentioned a couple times now Paul Buff and his Alien Bees.  For those who don’t know, Mr. Buff is the brains behind the Nashville-based company Paul C. Buff, Inc., which has spawned not only the Alien Bees but also the White Lightning flash units, both of which are quite popular lines of monolights.  All equipment is sold factory direct, so if you’ve never heard of them, perhaps that is why.

When I first started to amass photo equipment a few years ago, the Alien Bees were recommended to me by a friend and colleague.  I dutifully visited the website, and was immediately confused.  The price was right, but…why was the website decorated with cartoon aliens, stars, and planets?  Why did the lights have the same cartoon aliens on the sides?  Why did Paul Buff, owner of the company, refer to himself on the site as the alien King Luap?  What was this, Fisher Price’s My First Strobe Kit?  Was this a joke?  Was I being punk’d?

A quick Google search proved that the company was not a joke at all.  In fact, I honestly could not find a single case of anyone with anything unkind or derisive to say about the stuff (except perhaps the occasional snide remark about the cartoons).  On the contrary, the consensus was that the equipment was reliable, durable, versatile, and easy to use, and that customer service was excellent (factory direct, remember).  What more could one ask for?

Well, two things.  First, being monolights, one could ask for the ability to adjust the light’s power output remotely, from one spot.  Perhaps the biggest advantage pack systems have over monolights is that they provide a single bank from which the power for each light can be altered.  With monolights, the power is set on each head, so to adjust each light in a particular setup can be a bit of a chore, especially if a light is on a boom or otherwise out of reach.  Second, it would be nice to have no noticeable color shift in the light as you reduce its power output.

But now it looks as though Mr. Buff has struck upon elegant technological solutions for both of these problems.  Available today is the Cyber Commander, an on-camera transmitter much like a Pocket Wizard (but nuts to Pocket Wizards, right?) that allows the photographer to power up or down as many as sixteen lights in a single setup.  I won’t go into all the bells and whistles here.  If you want to learn more, you can check out the details on the website.  And Paul C. Buff, Inc. is also set to release a new line of lights that promises to solve the color temperature issue, delivering a constant 5600°K light by incorporating an insulated gate bipolar transistor shutoff of the flash tube in conjunction with a digital correction of the capacitor voltage.  Now, I’m not exactly sure what the latter half of that last sentence means, but if you’re in the market for some lighting, these might be some strobes to think about.

*There’s nothing in it for me to say any of this.  Oh, how I wish there was.

Time Enough For Love

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This past Thursday was the first Thursday of December, and as it happens every month, the many studios and galleries in Seattle’s downtown and Pioneer Square neighborhoods were alive and spilling over with people.  If you’re unfamiliar with ArtWalk, please click here to view my previous entry…and come on out next time!  My studio was open, as it almost always is, and it was quite crowded all night.  I showed a number of pieces, and two of the prints purchased were of this photo (click for a larger version):


Canon EOS 5D
f/10 @ 1/100, ISO 100

It’s titled “Time Enough For Love” because I like the phrase and it seemed appropriately arbitrary, and because one doesn’t generally associate love with unreasonable amounts of toilet paper (unless you’re me, I guess).  The idea for the shot came, of course, from the painting by Rene Magritte called The Son Of Man.  If you are unfamiliar with Magritte’s work, you really owe it to yourself to correct that problem.  It’s absolutely brilliant.  I don’t own nearly as many books as I’d like (lack of space), but I do have two collections of his work and I look through them quite often.  There’s a font of inspiration there.

Harry Potter and the Pocket Wizards That Quit Working But Will Not Be Replaced On Principle Because They Sell For Way, Way More Than Is Reasonable For Such Simple Little Things And I Refuse To Be Gouged So Egregiously

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When I started this blog, it really wasn’t my intention to ever use it as a forum to publicly complain about anything.  To complain is unappealing and most times people just don’t want to listen to folks blather on about the things that make them upset.  That said, I’ll be doing it anyway.  Please accept my apologies in advance.  It’s only because I think it might be of interest.  Truly.

This year, two Pocket Wizards just up and quit on me.  The second one went about a week ago.  Now, I take perhaps unreasonably good care with my equipment, so I promise you these deaths were not by my hands.  Cheap products just stop working sometimes, and there they are now—two dead little plastic husks not even heavy enough to serve as paper weights.

Okay, fine, so maybe Pocket Wizards aren’t as reliable as they should be.  Maybe they’re even garbage, and to be honest, even that wouldn’t be the most extraordinary thing in the world.  How many things are actually built to last?  What really bothers me, though, is that they’re the industry standard and they’re such expensive garbage.  Pocket Wizards, in a fair and just world, would cost twenty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents.  Maybe even just ten bucks and a jaunty song and dance.  But a hundred and seventy?  Are you kidding us with this?  It’s plastic and a circuit board—we’re not even talking a dollar to make one of these things.  Does a more flagrant highway robbery exist in the entire realm of photographic equipment?  I really don’t think so.  And that, by the way, is quite a charge.

So no, I won’t be replacing my fallen receiver.  Instead, I’ll be selling off my remaining Pocket Wizards and buying into the Alien Bees wireless system by Paul Buff.  They do the same job, and if one of these new remotes decides not to show up for work one day, two would be available for the cost of one Pocket Wizard (you know, so the first one will have the other to play with).  When you think about it, it’s what I should have done in the first place.

Okay.  Whew.  It’s over.  Thanks for reading, and for letting me rant.

The Swallows of Chattanooga

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Much like the swallows of Capistrano, I travel with my two brothers and my parents to a warmer climate each year.  Difference is, we converge on Chattanooga, Tennessee instead of South America.  And we’re only there for a few days, not a few months.  And we don’t subsist on insects caught in flight, because we’re not swallows.

The reason my family goes to Chattanooga is not because that’s where the Waffle House is.  The Waffle House being there—that’s just icing (or syrup, as the case may be).  No, we actually go to Chattanooga because that’s where my grandmother lives.  The six of us are scattered across the country so the holidays are really the only time we can all get together, and when you’re my grandmother’s age, one of the perks is that everyone else will come to you.  My grandma was born in 1910.  She just had her birthday a couple weeks ago, and that means she’s 99 years old.  That’s amazing.  She’s amazing.

Here is a photo we made together yesterday, on Thanksgiving day.  I know it won’t be as meaningful to you as it is to me, but I hope you will appreciate it nonetheless.  And I hope your holiday was as lovely as mine.

Canon EOS 5D
f/5.6 @ 1/8, ISO 200

The Man Who Wasn't There

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Here is a photo I made yesterday while in Wisconsin.  The idea came from “Antigonish“, a wonderful poem that was itself inspired by reports of the ghost of a man wandering the stairs of a house in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.  I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe it’s a good poem, and a nice photo.

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
-Hughes Mearns, 1899


Canon EOS 5D
f/11 @ 1/25, ISO 100

Post processing consisted of converting the file to black and white, removing the person from the image, and employing Photoshop’s diffuse glow filter.  There were a couple other minor tweaks, like slightly darkening the shadow, but nothing significant.  As ever, you’re free to click on it to view it larger.  I really hope you like it.

Love and San Francisco

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I visited San Francisco last weekend, and as the man says, I did in fact leave my heart there.  It was lost somewhere just outside the Rockridge BART station, and despite a desperate search, I was unable to find it before I had to leave for my plane.  I miss it very much, and if you find yourself there and you happen to see it, please, please get in touch.  You’ll find my number on my website.

Last Saturday, in less than an hour’s time and a radius of less than a mile, I saw not one, not two, but three wedding parties and their photographers.  Apparently, in the middle of November in San Francisco, brides just come out of the woodwork and you just about can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one of them.  Two appeared at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (quite a name for a place), and the third was just down the hill on a beach at South Bay.  Now, I have remarkably little interest in shooting weddings, but I do enjoy watching wedding photographers when I see them.  In this case, I noticed one was using a reflector to light her happy couple, another had a yellow Alien Bee (not the color I’d've chosen, but certainly festive) with a big ol’ umbrella on it (outside?!), and the third appeared to be going au naturel—no equipment besides the camera that I could see.  Nice—three different people, and as many ways of working.  Here are a couple quick snaps of them.

The Diptych Game, Part I

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Here’s something fun for the kids.  It’s a game, wherein the player—that’s you—tries to guess the word or phrase depicted by the two photos below.  Once you think you know it and want to see for sure, hover your cursor over either photo and the answer should appear.  Oh, and you can click on it to view it larger too, if you’d like.

I’ll be posting more of these in the future—they’re just entertaining little projects I like to do to keep my brain from atrophying.   I hope you enjoy them too.

Assault and Battery

Hint:  It’s a legal term.

Rep. Scott White Stands Up for the Homeless

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I recently had the opportunity (and the pleasure) to photograph Washington State Representative Scott White, a democrat from Seattle’s 46th district serving his first term.  The photo accompanies an article about his effort to pass legislation that would qualify violence against the homeless as a “bias-motivated” attack, or hate crime.  According to a report from The National Coalition For The Homeless with data spanning the past decade, fatal bias-motivated attacks in the United States against the homeless outnumber (by more than a factor of two, he told me) similar attacks motivated by ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion combined.  I wish Rep. White the best of luck with his proposal.

We made this photo beneath the I-5 overpass at 65th in Seattle, the site of the fatal stabbing of a homeless man named David Ballenger in August of 1999.  For the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s excellent article about David’s life and death, please click here.  For more information about Rep. White and his work, you can follow this link.  And to view a larger version of the photo, please click anywhere on it.

Scott White

How to Build a Photo of a Robot (Part II)

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And now, the exciting conclusion…

In the first part of this entry, I wrote a little bit about the lighting of the photo you see below (as always, you can click on it to view it larger).  As I said I would, this time I’ll share everything that occurs to me about each of the seven individual shots that went into the image—why they were necessary, how they were done, and/or what I think they add to the overall photo.

Those shots are:
1.  Female model (Lindsey) on the workbench and the workshop itself.
2.  Male model (Alan) and the electronic parts on the table.
3.  Lindsey’s right hand.
4.  Lindsey’s leg, in the background on the left edge of the frame.
5.  The wires coming out of the leg.
6.  The grass and trees visible through the window.
7.  The robot’s insides.

Robot

Canon EOS 5D Mk II
f/9 @ 1/160, ISO 100

Shots 1, 2, and 3:  So, first of all, look at the photo and try to imagine the rest of Lindsey’s body—hips and legs in sweatpants, carrying on past the left edge of the frame.  If I had only shot her with Alan, and didn’t get any shots of Alan by himself, I’d have had a pretty significant problem in post.  Lindsey’s lower half covered up Alan’s waist and forearm, which meant there’d be quite the hole in the photo once I turned her into a torso.  So Alan had to be captured in a different frame and dropped in later.  It’s the same problem with Lindsey’s right hand.  It’s out of sight when her whole body is there, but once she’s a torso, you expect it to be right there opposite her left hand, and it would look very strange (yes, “strange” is relative) if you didn’t see it.  So I had to shoot it separately and add it later.

Shots 4 and 5:  The leg was shot with Lindsey sitting on the workbench.  The bouquet of wires was photographed in my studio after the principal shoot, lit and Gaussian blurred in Photoshop to match the rest of the scene.  Personally, I think the leg is a nice touch.  It reinforces the idea that the robot is a work in progress, and that development of different body parts is happening concurrently.  Where possible, I really try to add little details to photos that might go unnoticed at first glance, because I think those are the things that make people want to keep looking.

Wires and Leg

Shot 6:  As I said in the previous entry, the workshop was on the third floor of the building.  The view out the window was of the concrete framework of Seattle’s Alaskan Way viaduct—unattractive, distracting, and not even really discernible.  So after the principal shoot, I took a stroll through one of Seattle’s many parks and found an area of grass with a treeline I liked very much.  Again, I think it’s a nice touch.  The wooded background suggests of a rural location and implies remoteness, maybe even suggests loneliness as the motivation for building the robot.  It’s a relatively small detail, but I think it explains a lot about the image and as I just said, I do love details.

Trees and Grass

Shot 7:  Constructing the insides of the robot was really the most challenging problem of the entire shoot.  I decided the best approach would be to build a little wall shaped like the cross-section of a human torso, and then attach little robotic-looking things to it.  The trouble is, you really have to make the wall exactly the size of the cross-section of your model’s torso—width, height, and shape.  All the pieces you attach to the thing have to fit within the walls of the robot’s body.  If they extended out, I would’ve had to cut them off in post, and odds are that would look…odd.  But how do you know you’re making the wall the right size and shape to correspond to your model’s torso at the point you’re cutting her in half?
Well, the first thing to do is figure out where that end point for her torso would be.  I thought it should be right at the start of her hips, where her waist widens and her lower back would meet the table.  Look at the photo again and imagine her top half were cut off any higher—say, just below her bellybutton.  Her back wouldn’t be touching the table at the point, and wouldn’t that look weird with a levitating stomach?
Once I decided on how much of her body to use in the photo, I met with her to build a cast of her body, out of plaster, from upper back to the cutoff point.  At art supply stores you can buy inexpensive rolls of mesh fabric coated in plaster (Rigid Wrap, it’s called).  Just cut a length of it, wet it, and apply it—easy, easy, lemon squeezy.  Then, once I had a cast, I could see exactly the size and shape of the space I had to fill with robot parts, and I could build a wall that would fit inside.
I made the wall out of silver paper mounted onto foamcore.  The silver paper looks like a sheet of metal, especially when viewing the image at full size.  The robot parts are from a couple $3 VCRs from Goodwill.  I liked the idea of using recognizable parts—the kinds of things your average person might have on hand and make use of.  I’m particularly in love with the shiny rotating head in the center, and its resemblance to a spinal column.  Details!
When it came time to shoot, after Lindsey had left, I photographed the wall of robot parts sitting at the base of the plaster cast, which had been placed (as best I could tell) in the same spot she had been lying.  It wasn’t exact, of course, but it was close enough that the Photoshop work was a breeze.

Parts and Plaster
(Like Steve Buscemi, it may not look like much, but it performs wonderfully.)

Now, there are a number of things I could say about the post work itself—about layer masks and selections, blending modes and healing brushes—but I’m not sure how interesting that would be to read.  So before I close, I’ll just mention a few last post production items I think might be of interest:

· It’s absolutely necessary to get your shadows right.  If the lighting looks off, you’ve really screwed the pooch, and it’s common to have to massage the photo a bit when you’re doing composites.  For example, I had to add shadows to the right hand (cast by the torso) as well as the table (cast by the robot).  It might take a couple tries, but the time spent is a small price to pay for getting it right.
· The lip of the shell housing the robot parts was made by darkening a thin selection of Lindsey’s skin.  The inside of the robot’s shell was made by copying parts of Lindsey’s stomach.
· I made Lindsey’s skin incredibly smooth in Photoshop.  There was a fair amount of cloning and healing brush use, as well as dodging and burning.  Now hold on—before you get excited and call me a hypocrite given my previous blog entry about unnecessary post work, let me just say that no, there was absolutely nothing wrong with her appearance at the outset.  But for this to work, she really needed to look as though she were plastic, fresh out of the box.
· I barely did a thing to retouch Alan’s face.  His expression, to me, is absolutely perfect (caring, proud, and content all at the same time), and I couldn’t have been happier with the way the lighting picks up the lines in his face when smiles.  It’s very real, very genuine, and I didn’t mess with that at all.
· There’s a lot of composite work, yes, and I did plasticate (that should be a word) Lindsey, but otherwise, the photo is pretty much as it was shot.  I made minor global corrections to adjust contrast, gave the photo a very slight overall glow, and tweaked a couple colors a little.  Not much, really.