Josh Sommers' photostream  

Caged

Modeled and rendered in Carara, composited in Photoshop.

Sorry you have to see my side ass. :)

First of all- how it was done: I started by sketching the concept out, which was prety straight forward, just had to get it on paper to begin with. After that I set out to build the scene in Cararra 3D. Again, fairly straight forward. The top and bottom of the cage began as cube primitives which I converted to polygons so that I could warp and bend them a bit to make them not so perfect. The bars were modeled as lathe objects. I started with one, duplicated it 6 times, grouped those together and duplicated three more times to form the bars on all sides. Then one at time I bent each bar slightly and randomly. The next task was acquiring and building the texture maps. All the texture maps came from CGTextures.com. Finally, I set up the lighting to mimic how I intended to light the actual scene with two soft boxes and a beauty dish.

I took precise measurements to position the camera exactly where the camera was positioned in Cararra so that all the angles, scale and lens distortion were precisely the same.

I then rendered the final output twice, once with everything visible, and once with just the top of the box and the left side and front bars visible.

Next step was setting up the studio for the shoot. I setup a table on some bricks to sit under, but in the end I went without the table because it wasn't necessary. I positioned two 400ws strobes with large softboxes with honeycombs on either side and in front of the camera, behind the subject (me) and pointed at 45 degree angles towards the camera. I positioned a 300ws strobe with a beauty dish on a boom stand directly above the camera, pointed downward. I positioned the cards on the floor in front of me, and held two in my hands, and used a wireless remote to trigger the camera. Only needed to take about ten shots to get the right shot. Initially I had pants on, but they just seemed to clutter the shot, so I took them off, despite feeling a bit odd about putting naked photos of myself on flickr.

I combined the two rendered shots and the shot of myself in Photoshop. The first rendered shot served as the background. I then pasted in the photo of myself and the cards on the floor. Then I used a layer mask to isolate myself and the cards from the studio background. Next, I pasted in the second rendering of just the front bars. This made it much easier to reposition myself within the cage without having to move the image independant of its mask.

After the bulk of the work was done, what remained was adjusting the lighting of the scene and adding in shadows where necessary. There are three shadow layers. One is my shadow in the cage, simple. The other layer is the shadow of the bars on my back, arm and foot. The third shadow, which required the most work was the shadow of my body out the back and side of the cage. This was the hardest because I had to combine my shadow with the existing rendered shadows of the bars on the floor. For this I used my old pal "Blend If" in the layer options dialog to allow me to match the tone of the existing shadow and then simply paint everywhere I wanted shadow and in places where the shadow already was, it would show through the shadow I was painting, and therefore I wouldn't get any building up of shadows. This worked about 95% as well as I needed it to work, it could still use a little adjustment, but it's pretty close.

After that it was just about a few global adjustments to color balance and brightness and contrast.

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Ok, now the why. As some of you may have noticed, my work has stopped arriving on flickr at the pace that it used to. A big part of that has to do with how busy I am with work and the large Organicann side project I am involved with. But in addition to that, I started to become interested in Texas Hold'em several months back. One of my associates/friends is a skilled Hold'em player. In fact, as I write this he is seated at day two of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. With him as a resource, my interest in the game grew exponentially, and as I have done with so many things in my life, including photography, I became obsessed. Now, to be clear, I do mean obsessed, and not addicted. I have not lost tons of money or spent countless hours at a casino; I play online mostly, and I joined a league so I play one inexpensive live tournament every Wednesday night.

But here is the thing about me and my obsessions: They do tend to take up a lot of my time, and in so doing, usually, at least temporarily, userp the prior obsession, which in this case is Photography.

Those of you who are familiar with Texas Hold'em might wonder why in this image I am holding the best possible hand, whereas you think for this illustration I would want to illustrate having a terrible hand. To me poker is all about having bad hands. It's all about folding, and patience. It is the prospect of this hand that keeps the hold'em player coming back for more. You might also wonder why I chose AA for the turn and river cards. This situation, where I am holding a royal flush, but the board pairs up aces is the dream situation. Any other player with a 10 or an Ace or any two clubs is going to have a very hard time folding. The hand I hold is the absolute best hand to be had and in that situation what you want is someone else to have second best. If they have crap, they will fold and your cards will be useless. The prospect of this hand serves as a metaphor for that which has in some ways caged me in.

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Uploaded on Jul 7, 2009

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