The Making of: Attention!

I love shooting all animals but one of my favorites has to be birds. Not only can they be real colorful and beautiful but they are also difficult to get great shots of. Usually when people take pictures of birds, the personality isn’t captured. Birds are very expressive but many people fail to realize just how much.

                  

On one of my days off from everything, I went to the Flamingo Hotel and Casino to photograph all the animals in the habitat. In the middle of it, there are large Macaw parrots. People are able to hold the birds and get their photo taken with them. Afterwards, they are able to buy the photos. When they weren’t busy, I hung around the birds and took a lot of photographs of them. Because it was so windy that day, the bird’s feathers were almost constantly fluffed up. This called for a higher shutter speed so the feathers wouldn’t lose their detail when they blurred out. It also made the birds look snuggly and cute, resulting in amazing photographs.

This shot of Tico was my favorite of maybe thirty shots I managed to get that turned out well. It really shows his personality off because he loves to scream and is a trouble maker, which makes him feisty. He’s always picking on the other birds and getting into things he shouldn’t. I think a person that doesn’t know him could tell these things by this photograph.

                  

I was there shooting for about two hours, waiting patiently for the birds to pose for me or do something cute and this shot made the wait worth it. When I shoot pets, there is no such thing as wasted time.

                  

When I edited the shot in post, I brightened the colors up just a bit by bringing the whites up and added contrast by bring the blacks up just a little. I didn’t need to play with the saturation at all because it was already so colorful.

The Making of: The Shark Bite

I wanted to do a location shot of a drink that I’ve had in the past. I was thinking of what types of drinks I could shoot and thought of the Shark Bite from Joe’s Crab Shack because it was so memorable. I still remember the first time I tried it. The waitress came out with a glass of blue liquid, then she yelled out something along the lines of “Everybody look out! There’s blood in the water!” She poured a shark-decorated vial of grenadine in all the while, making it look like there really is blood in the drink. Not only did it taste good, it was a fun drink to be served with.

                When I first got seated at the restaurant, I told the hostess that I was going to order something but I was mainly there for a photo shoot. She told the waitress, who readily agreed to help. While I was setting up, I asked the waitress if she had a flashlight I could borrow. She brought it to me before bringing the drink over, which helped me calculate the exposures a bit better. I also told her which drink I wanted and requested that she hold off on the grenadine pouring until I was ready. I took some test shots of the lighting with the flashlight behind and to the side of the drink, then added the shark vial to the shot and positioned it and the glass. After a few different angles of shots, I asked the waitress to very slowly pour the vial. She went a bit too fast at first but once she slowed down, the liquid was falling at a good flow. I took shots at different points.

                I ended up with three shots I liked and they turned out to be at all different times and colors. Because of this, I chose to make the shots into a fun triptych with labels.

The Making of: Mizuki B&W

This photo was taken during my second pet shoot in my portfolio building project. My client has two cats, Mizuki and Takashi. Mizuki is a beautiful long hair calico that loves posing for the camera. I already had a lot of great shots of her but I still had more time to fill. I asked the owner to go about her routines with her cats and to do stuff with them and pretend I wasn't there. At one point, she decided to trim the cat's nails. Takashi hates it so I didn't get any good photos of him but Mizuki just gave me the calmest face and sat there and acted like nothing was happening. I decided to take photos at different angles and the front one turned out the best. Her expression doesn't give any indication what's happening to her.

To edit the photo, I opened it in Adobe Camera RAW and barely changed the highlights, shadows, blacks, whites, and clarity. Then I opened it in Photoshop to convert it to black and white. I made a mask so the cat wasn't affected during the process. I used the pen tool then made a selection with a feather of two pixels. Then I selected the eyes to brighten them and make them pop a bit. The last thing I did was remove the bell from the cat's collar because it was a little distracting. I used a combination of the clone stamp and healing brush tools.

The Making of: The Macaw Experience

In my job as a Bird Handler and Photographer with Digiphoto, I get to play with birds all day. So I had the idea to make an ad for the Macaw Experience. The whole process essentially took three steps. I took photos of the birds, edited and arranged the photos in Photoshop, and then went back to take some photos of the various surroundings of one of the bird locations.

                On my day off, I went to take photos of my coworkers (i.e. the birds). I took photos each bird in different areas but decided to put them on a nearby bench one at a time. This gave me the best shots. It also helped afterward during editing since I would have had to cut out the perch from their feet or other various body parts. I used the same exposure for each bird so the photos would all match. I took mostly body shots in a side profile and decided to use those for the final pics.

                After I had all my photos picked out, I cut out the birds from their backgrounds. Then I moved them around the border of a black background in different ways to figure out which way looked the best. I had started out with a vertical layout but it wasn’t working so I chose the horizontal. Next, I added the words and logo to the middle and added drop shadows to the birds to make them pop. The black background wasn’t working so I went back to work and shot various scenes from the area and tried them all out on it. I chose the waterfall because we do shoots there and the colors really made the birds stand out. In total, I think the whole project took about hours to complete.