Today I am going to talk about the process of creating a picture.
I love to take pictures, from weddings, family portraits, events, what ever it is, I love to create. But those pictures are the standard fair. Bride and groom, mom dad brother sister and the family dog. They are creative, and they get the bills paid. But every once in a while I get the urge to create something that was born in the depths of my brain.
It started with a simple idea, a model dressed in a flowing dress, dancing somewhere that you the general public would recognize.
The idea started when I helped my good friend Ramiro Gaytan on a shoot we did out in the desert. You can take a look at the video here;
Ramiro has inspired me to work harder to create pictures that make you say WOW. So with that in mind I started to think of what I wanted to create. I came up with five ideas, the theme of them would be "Dancing in LA" and I will share those with you on a later date, after I shoot those shots.
But in the mean time, I traveled to Colorado Springs, and with a little inspiration from Ramiro I decided to plan a photo shoot. Drawing on the same theme of "Dancing in LA" I wanted to have a model dancing somewhere. Now Colorado offers some things that we just do not get here in LA, the first being weather! Blue sky's are abundant here in LA, but what about clouds, rain, something different! Not only that but there are mountains and green grass all this great stuff to use in a photograph.
So now I had the idea and it was time to plan. I needed to get a model out there so I went looking on a site called Model Mayhem. Now I have never had much luck there but I decided to try again. I received a few responses but as true to Model Mayhem history they all either did not call, or could not show, except for one. The one that did was just spectacular, Makenzie Schrag She is a trained dancer and was able to give me the dance poses I was looking for. So with a model, I just needed to find the right place. I had the general location in mind, The Garden of the GodsI just needed to find the right spot.
The day of the shoot was just perfect, cloudy overcast and a little bit of rain. You could not ask for anything more! We shot in different areas and captured many different images. By the time it was all said and done I had over 200 images from the day.
As i was looking over the pictures I saw the one that captured my vision. I knew I had found the one!
Now to make it my vision, I wanted to make the photo to look like a painting. So into photoshop I go, but I did not want the computer to do it all so I did all of the work by hand. 12 hours later my vision had come to life.
If you are interested in purchasing a print I will be selling a very limited number of prints so contact me for sizes and prices.
A little behind the scene info, I shot this with my Nikon D200 and Nikor 28-70 2.8 lens. For lighting I used a Quantum flash with my pocket wizards to fire them off.
I will be posted some of my regular work as well as some stuff I do for me. So leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
