Hedging Your Bets

I guess this shot could have gotten expensive, prop-wise. 

Happily, I decided I want it to look pretty meager.

Clare's is a place I've never been. Since I'm not a tween. Anymore.

Pegboard is the manly equivalent to scrapbooking, I think.

I spent several hours figuring out the exact proper placement on the board.

This is the result of an earlier go at it - with my wife's engagement ring, but the ring's not iconic enough, and I didn't like having to dupe in the rest.

I haven't actually figured out how the guy who would buy a five pack of engagement rings would use them. Is he hedging? Planning real long term? Polygamist?

How to Shave

As I mentioned earlier, somebody suggested that my photos, that have some sort of background to them, are substantially more interesting than the ones that have plain backgrounds. Many of my photographs are about an object, and often about an object that existed only in imagination, so for me, a plain background often works - the object remains ungrounded, out-of-context, free of association.

Nevertheless, I agree with her - the photographs with more interesting backgrounds are more interesting. This time around, I had time to build proper sets, rather than try to create some in post, and I made a trip out to Scene 2 for more stuff.

I glued these tiles to the plywood, and used lightweight putty to grout them in - not waterproof, but good enough. I kept the surface and the background separate for easier manipulation.

And here's the final shot. I floated it, and left off any further propping, like shaving cream, mirror, etc, so it still has one foot in otherwordly, which is probably just enough.

Just Trying to Help Out

Did you know that people used to wear timepieces on the wrist?

 I've never worn, with any kind of commitment, a wristwatch. 

I imagine that having to wind a watch would eventually become a chore.

Square Bottle Debut

David from Clean Bottle contacted me recently. He's launching a new product, and wanted new photography to kick it off. 

We decided to do one heroic shot as a leader, and...

...a sort of survey in a more catalog style.

I wanted to do the water shot, and I wanted to give Dave a straight black shot, and I didn't want to light it twice, so I elevated it over black plex, and my assistant, Josh, built a short lip around it, to contain the water later.

To make ripples, we tried jiggling the plex, hitting the underside with a mallet, and streaming water in from a hose. After all, we found that shooting air down the front surface worked the best.

Channelling Irving Penn. 

The bottle comes in four colors, but at shoot time, Dave only had a black bottle, a white bottle, and two Pantone codes.

I created the green and orange bottles from the white bottle, and put the four together in post, although the group shot above was done on set. I am slightly allergic to Photoshop, and much prefer to get it in camera, but at time like this, it just makes more sense to do it in post. Getting the colors right, since "color" is such a complex phenomenon, took a lot of finessing with the hue, and the value, not to mention different qualities and colors of light in the various shots.

A fast, very technical shoot to kick off a very interesting new product!

More info: There's a Square Bottle Kickstarter on through Oct 11, and they're already 75% of the way there.

Clean Bottle Website

The Clean Bottle Boy at the Tour de France

On Gear Patrol

Featured on Gear Patrol today, the new Square Bottle.