Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
We’ve all been there, playing with our action figures as kids as if they were real. For me it was He-Man. For photographer Ari Mahardhika, it’s the characters of Marvel Universe, but just playing wasn’t enough.
In this amazing series of images, Ari has brought these action figures to life, using a selection of techniques to photograph and composite them into real world scenes.
Recently I was wandering around that Facebook thing because it is the ultimate procrastination tool. I can’t say I remember what I was putting off, but I’m so glad I was. Through a series of countless random clicks on god knows what links, I wound up on an event page with an open invitation to a steampunk studio photography weekend at Omni Lens Studios.
“Hmm this seems interesting, ” (Robert thought to himself). “Oh dang, and it’s only half an hour from here…” I clicked the “I’m Interested” option which kept me in the loop without actually committing to anything. Then for the next several weeks I would check back in periodically to quietly stalk the various attendees, photographers, makeup artists, and models – you know, typical internet creepin.
We’ve all had that feeling of being in a beautiful or dramatic landscape, wanting to capture it, and then found it was missing just a little something once we got it home and saw the images big on the computer screen.
German architectural photographer, Andreas Levers has also felt that on occasion and decided to do something about it by blending the real with the computer generated.
DIYP spoke to Andreas to get a little more information and some insight into his work and process.
One of the problems when trying to create the images we see in our head is that, in the real world, the constituent parts can be very difficult to get together in front of your camera all at the same time.
This is where compositing steps in. Sometimes, you just have no choice, and you may need to photograph elements separately and then blend them together in post.
I’ve been following the work of illustrator and retoucher Arun Kumar for a while now, and his videos rarely fail to impress me, and his latest two part compositing tutorial is no exception.
Think your Photoshop skills are up to scratch? You might want to think again when you see some of the work by Reddit user Your_Post_As_A_Movie.
Taking some rather ordinary images, as well as some exceptionally good ones, he creates amazing posters that wouldn’t look out of place on the walls of your local movie theatre.
When Chris Sebastian contacted me about creating cover art for his debut album ‘The Good Old Days‘, I initially wasn’t sure how the scenario would work. Chris was in Sydney, I was in Melbourne, and his photoshoot was happening in Sydney within the week. I admit, I’m a bit of a control freak… In order to create a cohesive composite cover art piece, I normally would shoot every element myself. I need to have control of the light and the perspective to ensure everything fits together.
I asked Chris if I could liase directly with the photographer and art direct the project remotely. I wasn’t sure how the collaboration would work, but I was willing to give it a try.
Today’s digital effects are pretty amazing (or not) depending on your view. But both the good CGI and the bad CGI have one thing in common, they are computer generated.
Not so long ago, the concept of computerized massive scenes was not even conceived yet and effects studios used different methods to “create” sets bigger than can possibly fit in a studio. One way of doing it was hand painting a matte glass with a set and using it around the shot action. One of the most famous effects studio: Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) released a movie showing how they used Matte glass and hand painted sets to create Indiana Jones and the first chapters of Star Wars. The amount of work and planning to make one of those matte shot was laborious almost beyond possible.
The year comes to an end and just before the busy days of watching StarWars and celebrating the holidays I’m rushing to finish some images and close this year off. One of the images that needed to be done was my contribution to the Dark Realm Collective – Black Christmas Art Pack.
I’ve been part of this collective since its conception and we’ve been making awesome dark images throughout the year, mostly themed around festive holidays and events. Naturally we needed to do a Christmas theme.
So for the Christmas art pack we had a few themes to pick from, the themes are more of a guide to get us started.
In the text below I am going to show you how it was done step by step. If you want to use any of the packages from this tutorial, the nice guys from the Image Manipulation Store agreed to provide a 20% off coupon (till Dec 30th), for any of the packages used here. Just use coupon code whitewalker4 on checkout.
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