Joel Cummins Photography

Shooting The Police (with camera)

2010-12-22T13:17:00.000-08:00


SDHS junior Adam Lacey

On Monday I had the privilege of working with the San Diego Police Department's Star/Pal Team hosting a youth basketball clinic. As Defined in their own words: "STAR/PAL (Sports Training, Academics, Recreation/Police Athletic League) is a nonprofit organization that provides over 10,000 youth services annually in inner-city neighborhoods throughout the city and county of San Diego. STAR/PAL offers free educational, athletic, and recreational programs which focus on promoting youth safety, positive life choices, and academic success. All STAR/PAL program directors are full-time law enforcement officers who coordinate unique programs and recruit additional law enforcement and community volunteers to work directly with underserved youth. By bringing youth & law enforcement officers together in this manner, STAR/PAL helps build safer communities in the long run."

This is the second sports event I have photographed for Star/Pal and it was equally rewarding. About Seventy kids from the greater San Diego area attended, They warmed up with drills and stretching, experienced six different skill building stations and competed against Volunteers in a series of scrimmage games.

To learn more about the Star/Pal program got to www.starpal.org

Mind and Body Meets Lights and Camera

2010-10-12T12:31:00.000-07:00

On location for Club Intrawest to capture the story of a remarkable yoga retreat designed to bring its guests into a state of balance, peace and well-being. The goals for this assignment are to convey a sense of tranquility, and enjoyment; showcase an amazing property; and allow the viewer to relate to the experience. After a pre-shoot scouting trip, the creative director and I selected three locations for our morning shoot, giving the client a wide selection of imagery that compliments the landscape and architecture as well as the yoga vacation. With careful planning and a clear objective we are able to capture these (my favorite) images and many more in two hours.

hand painted, hand photographed

2010-04-21T23:52:00.000-07:00

One question I often ask of myself is "how can I keep the integrity of a subject in a commercial environment?" In other words, how can I maintain a product's individuality while giving it a professional feel? Shooting the hand painted pieces from Metolius Ridge Tile posed this quandary. From my home town Eugene, Oregon (by coincidence) Metolius Ridge Tile hand paints individual pieces and mosaic murals on ceramic tile. You will have to decide for yourself if the pictures do the art any justice. I'm just glad to be a part of the process. These images were taken in mixed light at a home in the Hideaway Club.

See these images and more soon at: http://www.metoliusridgetile.com

Seeing Intensity, Seeing Red

2010-04-18T15:03:00.000-07:00

Last week at the Festival of Life I shot Red who opened for Third Day. Red is one of the most energetic bands I have ever seen with driving rock rhythms you can feel in your chest. I had unfettered access to them during their set and I walked away supercharged.

Clean Sweep

2010-04-01T00:17:00.000-07:00

One thing I often hear from small business clients is, "We want people to know that we are big enough to handle their needs and small enough to offer personal attention to their needs." The challenge for me is to portray that in pictures. One day shooting for Cleanovations, a cunningly successful service business, gave me the perfect opportunity to demonstrate just how BIG a small business can be. With very little prompting on my part, I was able to follow them for the day and capture them hard at work for some pretty noteworthy customers. I have a new-found appreciation for these pristine buildings now that I know how much work goes into keeping them nice and shiny.

Having Fun -as always...
-J

The Daylight-Only Fashion Shoot

2010-03-15T22:14:00.000-07:00

O.K. The truth is, I love lighting, I love strobes and softboxes, gridspots, gels, I love wireless technology that triggers all my lights in synchronous perfection. And most of all- I love creating environments and moods with lighting. But sometimes the conditions are just right for what you want- and to add anything would be overkill. The following couple of images were shot under completely ambient light and the last one is what I call a target of opportunity- One of those moments when you see something in a moment and grab it before it's gone.

That's a lot of fun for me.

-J

The Whole Shooting Match

2010-02-20T23:59:00.000-08:00

I Just Completed a week of shooting for a Colorado-based action sports company where we photographed a host of images for their 2010 product line (a bit late I know- but it's a summer sport). The shoot began with studio stills of components and accessories, moved into soft goods on models and culminated with an exciting hunt for lifestyle images on barren desert roads in Southern California. Here are some samples from the assignment.

The project was a tremendous success.

Check out all the results at www.streetswell.com

-J

Portrait in a Box: Part 2 (Lightroom Retouching)

2009-12-04T22:36:00.000-08:00

Quick Lightroom fixes for portraits. I touched on some of these techniques in an earlier post but I wanted to talk a bit about building presets for your retouching to make the process simple and fast.

This post is dedicated to quick Lightroom fixes. Using the photo from the part 1 post; These are the presets that I like to use when gently retouching a portrait. We start by building the presets. There are three that see the most use. They are: Brighten Eyes, Soften Skin, and Whiten Teeth. these seem to cover the bulk of fixes aside from cloning blemishes.

Here are the settings that I like.

Brighten Eyes

Exposure +.25

Brightness + 5

Soften Skin

Clarity -50

Sharpness-25

Whiten Teeth

Brighten +5

Saturation -30

After each of these choose: "Save Current Settings as preset" and name them accordingly.

You have a lot of latitude to increase the individual sliders after you have brushed over the affected area. I like to keep things natural and try not to make the changes too obvious. the teeth have a huge impact as digital cameras seem to yellow them badly. this is a fast way to clean up a few things and greatly improve your finished product.

These are the before and after for my purposes. gentle teeth whitening, blemish removal, eye brightening and skin softening. I also vignetted the image a little bit to center the focus on the subject.

Portrait in a Box: Part 1 (The Shoot)

2009-11-30T22:46:00.000-08:00

So the phone rings and there is someone who wants to have some pictures taken for their website. "How about a nice environmental portrait?" I ask- armed with all the cool "strobist" ideas and always hoping for additions to my portfolio. "No thanks, I just want a professional portrait for my work." responds the caller. "Dang" I think to myself.

This is a two-part post on shooting a studio style portrait on location. The second post will be about the post production in Lightroom.

Part 1: A Portrait Studio in a Box. For this type of shot you need only a few lights and some space to work. The picture below was photographed in the Client's front entry.

One trip from the car brings in the gear: here is the list.

3- Nikon SB-800 flashes
3- light stands
1- Botero collapsible background

1- Photoflex 42" Silver/White collapsible reflector

1- 48" Paul C. Buff white umbrella

1- 43" Wescott silver Umbrella

2- Pocket Wizards

There are a lot of ways to build a portrait lighting setup. A simple Key/Fill combination with subtle rim light and background light were used here.
I used the PW's to fire the Key light and slaved (optical) the other two flashes. this will work with almost any flash and trigger combination.
I placed the background light on the floor and used the third stand to hold the fill reflector.
In the next post we'll talk about the lightroom work.

2009-10-03T20:34:00.000-07:00

Here are a few shots from last night's show, Jamie Foxx and a hip-hop/R&B review.

I am not a music critic but I would say this ranks up there with Smoove B. I'll stop with that- lest i get sued or loose my job...

Had a great time as always shooting a live event with a fantastic light show... hats off to the production crew.

fotografiar cajones (taking pictures of boxes)

2009-09-18T00:01:00.000-07:00

I just finished a product shoot for Roselynn Percussion who make the coolest hand drums I have ever played. (I like to play a little). These cajons are super-cool! They also make a snare and bass drum.This represents a great photographic challenge for me. How do you give visual interest to boxes? Here is my attempt.

Heather & Nick

2009-08-28T23:35:00.000-07:00

Heather and Nick were Married on June 13, 2009 at The Vail Church in Colorado. Here are a few favorites.

Dear friends and wonderful people, blessings to you both.

Re-touching with Lightroom

2009-06-04T21:31:00.001-07:00

An Apology: this post is more about Adobe Lightroom than photography in general.

After recently doing some portraiture for a client, I was given a list of re-touch specifics to perform on one of the images. The client was very pleased with the imagery but, after consulting a friend in marketing, returned with a list of touches to be made. that list was as follows:

1. Smooth the lines around the eyes. * (most important)
2. Brighten up the eyes * (very important)
3. touch up chin a bit
4. Remove purple shadow from right nostril and chin
5. Take away some of the shadow around you right eye.
6. remove one chain from around the neck.

Here goes...

After

I do not enjoy doing this kind of work... I think it is because of all the bad Realtor portraits I have seen where there is so much post processing done that the subject is almost unrecognizable when you meet them in person. Alas... I decided it was time to try Lightroom's corrective tools rather than the vastly more robust Photoshop CS4.

Read the italicized portion only if you are a grouchy person and will be empowered by the crankiness.

Let me first say that I chose to light the subject as seen in the "before" image. And I must qualify that to me "perfect" light can be achieved in any mall (or strip mall) in America where a portrait studio resides. And- yes in fact i did know that two soft light sources (one slightly brighter than the other) camera right and left will create a lovely key and fill light combination that lacks only a "hair" or "rim" light to complete the shadowless (and wrinkle-less) happiness known as Olan Mills portraiture. So, I confess that i like interesting and/or mysterious light better and secretly I believe it is the very blemishes and flawed skin we all possess that define us, call it character if you like. Alas, this is not a photo essay on career women or the effects of aging, this a marketing piece that relies on a face which must appear both empathetic and palatable. (the more palatable the better evidently) So after a phone conversation with the client to clarify a few things I go to work- Knowing that once she sees a re-touched version, all the other images will appear unflattering, and that whatever realism I stubbornly want to cling to will be gently brushed away by my own hand (and mouse).

So- having aired out my curmudgeonry, It is time to see what Lightroom can do.

I will recite my steps per the list above.

1. Smoothing eye wrinkles- First the "Spot Removal" tool. placing the tool below the eye, sized the same as the pupil, I begin to blot the wrinkles (cloning portions of the the cheeks over the line) two key elements work well for me, first, clone from an area of matching light (find some skin with the same brightness, not darker or lighter) Second adjust the opacity down between 50% and 70% to suite your tastes. I don't want to erase the line below the eye i want to deemphasize it (my three year old has lines under the eyes) ...More eye effects following.

2. Brighten the eyes- Using the adjustment brush. I open up the exposure a bit. Don't over do this! It will look very unnatural if you do. I use separate operations for the eye ball and the surrounding socket (eyelids etc.) First the eyeballs can take more over exposure than skin second, the eyelids can be softened simultaneously by reducing clarity (don't soften the pupils)

3. Touch up chin- Easy spot removal... stick to matching brightness with "cloned" skin. keep your tool as small as you can.

4. Purple shadow removal- (this light is actually reflected daylight seeping through a high window. I should have shaded the window) Using the adjustment brush, I painted a small area of the nostril and began reducing saturation until the blueness subsided. It is still visible but not as obvious.

5. shadow at right eye- This was reduced in step 2. this is the shadow side of the face, completely removing it would be foolish.

6. gold chains- as you can see- we kept the chains but some patience with the spot removal tool will make anything go away.

Extra steps-

1. Using the adjustment brush, I reduced the clarity over the whole face (softening the skin) in trouble spots I did more than one pass.

2. I adjusted the fill light up to 25, the recovery to 10, and warmed the color balance from tungsten 2950K to 3100K (a little white balance warmth goes a long way)

3. Also I worked on the hand!! Using the steps above i removed sun spots and smoothed wrinkles. Hands are a tell tail sign of manipulation, if you ever want to know if a woman has had a face lift, look at her hands. For this image, a young looking hand was as important as the face. (P.S. men don't typically notice this as readily as women.)

A few last thoughts: Subtlety is the key! the moment the image is visibly deteriorated you have failed. (see how her eye lashed suffered for all the smoothing- this may have been a little too softened).

Keep to your original goal with the photo(when you took the photo) and do your best to leave the image looking natural.

Lightroom was great! I love the before and after window and the ease of re-working previous treatments. I will be using these tool more often.

JC

Amy and Eli

2009-05-27T23:13:00.000-07:00

Amy and Eli were married in Palm Desert on May 9 at the Desert Falls Country Club. The ceremony was on the golf course with reception following inside. There is an expanse of fairways around the wedding site and i was surprised at how beautiful the enviroment was (I grew up here and have seen alot of golf courses). They were a lot of fun to photograph and prioritized the celebration of their marriage. I felt great freedom to be creative and enjoy my interactions with the bride, groom, and loved ones. These are a few images from the day.

From the rehearsal:

Getting ready:

First sight of the bride:

Ceremony with pictures of the pair:

Reception:

We had a great time.

These and others available at www.joelcmmins.com

Agriculture and Photography

2009-05-02T21:58:00.000-07:00

When people think of Palm Springs they don't often think farming, but the Coachella Valley is a major player in western states agriculture. I have to admit I felt like I had traveled to another place to photograph a bell pepper harvest, but in reality I was only 20 minutes from my home in Palm Desert. This assignment gave me the chance to take a more photojournalistic approach to my imagery. Being out in the fields at sunrise and hearing the low hum of the tractors as they idle along receiving bucket after bucket of hand picked bell peppers gave me lots of great compositions and the sense of being immersed in an environment. I had fantastic natural light all morning, even at the packing shed where the peppers travel by conveyor to be washed, sorted and packed within minutes (literally less than one hour)of being picked. The following are a few favorite images.

OK that was fun shooting, time to get back to work. Here's a nice report portrait.

This is shot with two tungsten gelled flashes and a WB of 3200K (warms the tones just a bit over the 2950K tungsten balance). The flash for the subject is diffused through a 43" shoot-through umbrella and the background flash is grid-spotted onto the conveyor. The light blue cast in the frame is daylight.

Environmental Portraits Strike Back

2009-05-01T21:38:00.000-07:00

This week has been very busy and I will probably spread my posts out as I get time. This series is from the Palm Desert Chamber of Commerce. These are a few "candid" Staff shots (I use the term candid very loosely).

The image below was shot mid morning with a lot of competing natural light as the building was designed with massive glass elements on both sides. I elected to use a single SB-800 flash fired through a 6ft by 8ft white muslin which provided a giant key light source off camera left. the muslin was parallel to my lens and in front of me enough that the infra-red master would trigger the flash. I also uses a small flag to prevent lens flare as the flash was basically perpendicular to me.There is nothing but daylight here in the next frame but I liked the composition and I admit that I abandoned a three light setup after fighting the sun and loosing to get this shot at near mid-day just out of the direct desert sunlight. Lastly, this portrait employed three flashes all gelled to tungsten. the first and closest (to camera) flash was bounced off a white muslin that both shielded the subject from daylight and diffused the source enough to get a soft and even glow. The second flash was fired through a grid spot onto the old photo next to her to add interest and give continuity to the warmth of the gel. the last flash is subtly fired into the etched glass down the hall- again for interest and continuity. This was a fun and challenging shoot with highly mixed light great architecture.

Environmental Portraits

2009-04-23T21:52:00.000-07:00

I had an opportunity today to photograph a series of portraits for a local Remodel contractor. I had to move quickly and get nine different settings for nine different people. This requires fast thinking, light weight gear and a strategy for environmental portraiture (thanks again David Tejada).

I used two Nikon SB-900's with an SU-800 commander for almost all of them. I balanced for ambient light and created the effects where I wanted them. I really like the SB-900's for their expanded versatility over the tried and true SB-800's, the fuctions for the SB-900 are very easy to change quickly and that is awesome when working without an assistant.

I wanted to capture sincerity in their expressions and give each person a distinct setting.
These kind of images can do wonders to create a sense of humanity within a corporate setting.
It's a great way to put a face (or series of faces) on a business.

Creating Sunlight for Interiors

2009-04-17T21:28:00.000-07:00

I recently photographed a beautiful home in which I was posed with an interesting challenge. How do you convey that there is a great big window in the room when it is not in the frame? Second, how do you add romance to a small room that is really nothing more than a bed and some end tables? the answer came from a technique I saw Joe McNally use in a Nikon video.

With a single SB-900 flash and tungsten gel on a 13' stand. I was able to mimic the golden glow of the sun through the big arched window. Adding some interest to the shot and giving the viewer that sense of romance that makes an image so inviting. I used pocket wizards to trigger the flash at full power for the effect.

Lastly, I just experienced a lighting workshop with David Tejada called Small Strobes Big Results in Orange County. It was dynamite! A great class and really cool people. I strongly recommend it to anyone pursuing this kind of photography. I can't wait to put some of these new techniques to use.

Thanks to all who were in the class.

San Diego Harbor

2009-03-29T15:43:00.000-07:00

San Diego is one of my favorite cities in the United States, I always enjoy the chance to go there for work and what's more I love the harbor most of all. So this wedding was a particularly good time for me.

However, With a late afternoon ceremony, we had very little time for photos with the cityscape in the background after the ceremony ended. This dilemma gave me an oppertunity to employ a quick lighting set-up to bring our night skyline and our bride and groom together for some really fun shots. In fact, it worked so well that we shot several couples in this manner.

More wedding imagery at joelcummins.com

New Website

2009-03-29T15:36:00.000-07:00

Well, after lot's of deliberation I have finally hammered out all the details of the new website. Regrettably, my blog has suffered quite a bit but I am now ready to resume posting. this photo is a recent addition from an architectural shoot. this and many others are available for viewing on the new site.

If for some reason you are reading this and didn't get here by way of the website, the address is http://www.joelcummins.com/

Orange County

2008-12-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

Kate and Phil exchanged vows in laguna Hills, It was a meticulusly designed ceremony and reception. The day offered many heartfelt moments and glimpes of the love and care shared by these two families.

See more images at http://www.joelcummins.com/

Outside in November

2008-11-18T14:40:00.000-08:00

There aren't too many places in the US that will afford you a gorgeous day for an outdoor wedding in November, Palm Desert happens to be one of those places. Courtney and Michael were married on the fairway at Monterey Country Club , the mountains and palms provided a stunning backdrop and lots of opportunity for photographs. The Reception was held at the clubhouse just a short walk from the ceremony and offered a romantic Spanish-style surrounding for the festivities.

Best wishes to this wonderful couple!

-Joel

See more images from Joel Cummins

Off to La Jolla

2008-11-12T21:01:00.000-08:00

Coastal weddings are always so much fun, David and Krystle were married in La Jolla and celebrated their reception at a nearby hotel. I thoroughly enjoyed both families and was touched by the spirit of purity and commitment in their relationship.

View More from Joel Cummins

Catching Up

2008-10-31T10:49:00.000-07:00

Well, this is my first entry... Great things are happening, Katie and Jon had a beautiful wedding and the King Estate is a spectacular setting. I played second photographer to Gene Newbold and had a great time with family and shooting whatever I wanted.

It's definitely easy to capture a good time when everyone has a great sense of humor and loves to have fun.

Best Wishes to Katie and Jon!

Feel free to vist joelcummins.com