Tim Denison | Photos

Chocolate milk, for the win

2012-02-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

I used to be really competitive. Okay, I still am, but not in the same way as before. I've mellowed out a bit as I've approached middle age and realize that my self worth shouldn't be based on performance, but I used to be a little like this kid.

Now competition is less a desperate attempt to prove myself, and more about fun and healthy motivation. So I was excited when Cynthia, my sister-in-law, told me that there was an opportunity to help her win an iPad 2 in a photo contest for Nestle. She had received a Halloween party pack from Nestle which contained tons of decorations, candy, snacks, even a lasagna - everything you'd need for a fun festive party.

The competition bit was to create a Halloween party mask out of the materials that came in the box. Cardboard, candy wrappers, whatever. Take a photo of your mask, upload it to the Facebook page, place well enough in a popular vote to enter the adjudicated round, and if the judges pick your photo, you win an iPad 2. Awesome.

Not exactly a foot race or a tennis match, but a bit of a challenge, both on the photography front and the team creativity front. The mask creation was a family affair with parents, aunts, and siblings all contributing to the creation. I thought their choice of mask was genius: the Nestle Bunny (Quiky, for those of us on familiar terms) himself.

The thinking was, if the mask was a Nestle icon in addition to being made of Nestle products, it might be even more valuable to Nestle promotionally (they retain rights to use the image as they see fit), perhaps giving us a little kick in the competition, should we make it to the judging round. Cynthia freehanded the bunny mask in pencil on the back of the party box, and then the whole crew went to town.

When they finished we considered how to shoot it and decided on the studio. Kari, my wife, would model for us in the closest thing we had to a brown bunny coat: her London Fog raincoat. Note the 'N' necklace and the pipe-cleaner wrapped 'straw'. It's the details that sell it, people.

**For interested photographers: I've got a softbox above the camera and a touch left, and a beauty dish below that (a setup I'd been experimenting with at the time). One rim behind, camera right.**

Long story short (too late), we had a blast, made a fun photo, and Cynthia and her husband Brian are now the owners of a shiny iPad 2. And I'm totally listing Nestle in my list of clients.

Chocolate milk. For. The. Win.

Jessi-Rose

2012-01-31T11:29:00.000-08:00

Jessi-Rose is a singer-songwriter currently on a West Coast tour. She is also an old friend of my brother and sister-in-law, so I had the amazing opportunity to spend a few hours with her yesterday grabbing some images to update her website with. I don't think I've ever run through so many looks in one session with an artist before. It was blast. Here are a few sneak peaks.

Merry Christmas from the Denisons

2011-12-15T15:04:00.000-08:00

Well Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to one and all from the Denisons. Today I'm sharing the 2011 Denison Family Christmas Photo that I just finished working on.

As I'd like for this blog to be helpful to beginning photographers and photoshop novices, I'll go into a little bit of how the photo was made a bit further down, but I first wanted to say that this photo is my first attempt at executing something that I've had in mind for quite some time, and which was in part put in my mind in the first place by John Keatley of Seattle, Washington, who has made a couple of stellar composited Christmas photos of his family (2010 Keatley photo & 2011 Keatley photo).

The idea for the photo came to me when I went downstairs one morning to find that my middle child and beautiful daughter Eowyn (waving, atop the dinosaur) had constructed out of wooden blocks, dominos, a small tin lunchbox and assorted plastic animals a really great tower. I stumbled back upstairs (it was pre-coffee in the morning) and grabbed my camera, then returned to grab a shot of the tower.

While I was on my stomach admiring how she had used different pieces, I kept thinking how much fun it would be to climb around on it. And that's how the Christmas photo idea took shape. Kari used this picture here to recreate a tower using Eowyn's overall design, but incorporated the words Merry Christmas into it.

If you're not interested in reading the description of the project below, let me say thanks for stopping by and please drop me a line in the comments if you've got something to say!

So here's the original photo of the tower

This is in the studio. I've got two softboxes on an AlienBees B1600 and a Hensel Integra 500 dialed in for similar output left and right at about 45 degrees to the background roll. They provide a nearly washed out background as well as considerable side illumination/rim light (note the highlights on the back of the dinosaur and again on the back of the elephant and bird. I then placed my AlienBees B800 camera-right and above with a giant parabolic reflector and diffusion sock on it.

After we got a reasonable looking shot of the tower, we started playing around with where we should have people and what they should be doing. This is one of the things I'd do differently on subsequent attempts. What we ended up shooting in terms of people required placing them where we envisioned them. Unfortunately, where we envisioned them let to a photo that didn't have the greatest balance in terms of composition. The eye isn't drawn through the photo very well. Next time, I'd like to figure out more precisely where people needed to be positioned for greatest compositional impact, and then find something for them to be naturally doing in that position.

In any case, we came to a decision about what to do with people (somewhat rushed as the studio is set up in the living room and we can only reasonably have it up for one day at a time) and shot it all. Here's a quick look at the originals.

Note how Kari emulated the angle of each animal that was being ridden. She's a genius.

I used the quick selection tool in Photoshop to select just the person of interest in each photo, and then created a masked layer out of that selection, which I drug over and dropped onto the tower photo. I did it this way rather than cutting and pasting because I wanted the freedom to paint back bits that my selection had missed, if needed.

I shrunk people down and mainly used Free Transform to get them into position. Then a bit of puppet warp to get the details right. For Simon, with the gun, there was quite a bit of messing around. Not the original photo has his arm in the air and the gun rather high. His right arm is up because I anticipated having him grasping the top of the R block to steady himself. However, I miscalculated what size he would be in the final photo and had to lower his right hand since his shoulder was already above the top of the block.

This hints at another issue. I actually intended people to be a bit smaller and shot accordingly. However, we were all just lost in the chaos with original sizing. Which should have been obvious beforehand. I enlarged everyone as much as I could, trying to keep them in scale to one another, and adjusted limbs to make them look as natural as possible.

On the left below you see people in their positions without much of anything done. On the right, the finished product, after I have painted in shadows (a difficult task for me and something which I anticipate getting much better at), applying some sharpening (via a high pass filtered layer on Linear Light blend mode), and messed with the color in various adjustment layers (some curves, some selective color layers - mainly I took the warmth out of the greens.)

Oh, and I also applied a lens correction filter to the final image. I used a profile nowhere near the lens I actually used - which was a 17-50mm Tamron f/2.8, by the way - just because it gave me the look I was after.

All in all, a reasonable first effort. A little disappointed in how jammed together the kids are in the upper right and that you can't tell whether I'm falling or climbing. But besides that, there's some life to the photo and I get a little chuckle from looking at it. Definitely a positive enough experience to produce more of this kind of work in the future.

Shoot me any questions about details you might have. Catch you on the flip side.

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Rebranding and Relaunching

2011-12-15T14:19:00.000-08:00

About a year ago, in October 2010, I launched my first website at timdenison.com. I was brand new to calling myself a photographer, but had a few decent images. I naively believed that if I just had any old web presence, people would flock to me for work.

What I didn't realize at the time, and what I have come to realize over the past year, is how important a brand identity is. (This is something I'm still learning about - not only its importance, but how to define and create one - and will be the subject of many of my posts here.)

In the beginning, timdenison.com included all of my best images from every category I had ever shot in. I had a wedding up, some engagements, some portraits and even some band photos that I had taken. These were framed within a website whose colors came from my bedroom. Chocolate and pale slate blue.

Did I mention I'm not a designer? Yeah.

So timdenison.com had some major problems from the beginning. But the biggest shortcoming was with the producer of the work, not the way the work was being displayed.

I was not clear on who I was as a photographer in the early going. I didn't have a consistent set of images to help me define who I was and what style of work I produced. So the body of work was slipshod and random.

Flash-foward a year later, and I'm still learning. But what I have begun to see a need for are two separate brand identities. One for my consumer photography - weddings, senior portraits, couples, etc. - and one for my commercial work.

The reason being that people who are in the market for engagement photos don't need to see my more heavily-produced studio stock work, and vice-versa for someone interested in my produced work.

So, a year after launching my first website, I've relaunched timdenison.com as my hub for my work as a stock and assignment photographer, and I will launch timdenisonphoto.com to promote local consumer work. I believe the separation of the two brand identities will help me more effectively promote my work in both markets. The new timdenison.com now features large images and a minimalist aesthetic, which I believe better frame the kind of work that I'll feature there.

The intent of this blog is to chronicle the ups and downs of building my Tim Denison brand. Stay tuned!