Daisy's Bakery

Food product shots make up some of my work lately. This one is for Daisy's Bakery who make yummy stuff. I had to shoot the cakes in and out of the packaging. Out was easy and I have a trick to shoot the cake under the plastic. What I do is use 2 hard lights, one left and one right. I have them plugged into two different strobe packs and shoot one image with the left light and a second with the right. Then I layer the 2 shots in Photoshop and change the blending mode of the top layer to either lighten or darken. One of those will make all of the super shiny reflections disappear! It's amazing!

iPhone

I really hate to admit it  but the saying is true: The camera you need is the one you have with you. 

I was dropping off an early edit of a video when my client Rick said that he would like a product image for the ending and all I had on me was my iPhone. I set up a rough studio with a turned around poster for a background, crouched down and shot. I will be honest and say that if I had lit these in my studio I would have filled the golden type a little better but after some Photoshop work, the iPhone image ended up finishing the video. The image above is from a 51MB tif. That's what I ended up with... and all from a phone.

B&G Foods

Well, Video just be crazy! I have been shooting and editing video since about 2011 but I have never shot 2 straight hours of a Power Point presentation. It all ended up being around a16GB file at 1080P. It told my client Rick that there was no way to make a 2 hour video email-able but I have gotten it down to less than 400MB @ 720P using the Handshake video app. It's pretty cool. I'm using both Premier Pro and Photoshop for the edit. 2 down and one to finish up. Video takes a lot longer to edit than stills...      

Bye bye Michael, I hardly knew ya.

Well, it has been confirmed. Michael Harris died as the result of a stroke one year ago. I've been searching for a definitive answer and now I have it. Before picking my son up from Laguardia airport, I stopped by his old apartment. The doorman didn't know Michael but a very nice woman told me that she would take my number and ask another doorman who had been there for years. She just called (thanks you so much) and now I know. My mentor, teacher who became my student has gone. Were I cannot say. Bye Michael. I hardly knew ye!