Josh Sommers' photostream  

Months ago my flickr friend Paul Bruins (www.flickr.com/photos/panorama_paul/) uploaded another amazingly beautiful vertorama. This one was particularly interesting to me because of the tree stump in front of a gorgeous warm sunrise (www.flickr.com/photos/panorama_paul/5966005473/). As soon as I saw it I asked Paul if he would allow me to use it for a composite. He very generously said "yes". For months I have been working on this image, mostly tweaking the background. I was procrastinating taking the shot of myself for the photo I had in mind because I wasn't sure what emotion/pose/concept I really wanted to play with. I settled on the concept of stagnation; a state that I sometimes find myself in, and appropriate since I felt that was part of what caused my delay in settling on the subject.

If you look at the original image you will see that I had to change a number of things to get it to be framed the way I had envisioned. I made some use of the content aware scaling feature in CS5 to stretach out the sky a little, but then I ended up cropping back down a bit too. I scaled up the whole tree stump to better fill the frame. This meant that I had to also remove the original stump and fill in the hole that doing so created. The hole was filled with about 80% water surface and 20% new vegetation. In both cases I used copy/paste to create new layers with existing content from other areas of the photos and then cloned and feathered edges etc. to get a clean match.

Next I set out to capture myself to add in. This was a little tricky since I was operating the camera myself and sitting on the floor in front of it and had to keep scurrying around to see if I was getting an appropriate angle. I only took about 30 shots and found one that worked within those. My studio was already setup for another shoot I was supposed to do that got cancelled, but I had to modify it a little to get this shot.

I used a 300ws studio strobe with large gridded softbox at full power, about 6 feet to subject left, and behind by two feet. This did not precicely match the position of the sun in the photo, but I knew this relative positioning would suffice. A second 150ws studio strobe was used with a beauty dish, and hung above on a boom stand, also full power, to get a little fill light. Both lights were triggered with Pocket Wizards.

Final step was isolation and compositing, which took around 5 hours. Kind of my standard isolation/compositiong approach used here. I wasn't able to use any kind of quick select or channel masking trick for the isolation, so I just had to resort to good old fashioned hand painted masking. I did employ some of my usual tricks for masking out the edges of my hair, which is essentially to get rid of the edges and create my own using custom hair brushes. I used 4 different hair brushes this time. I then put the isolated me into a smart object so that any additional masking is done in a different mask from the isolation mask, but I can still rpeserve the isolation mask.

There is one layer for the treestump, and then 8 additional layers are added to that to bring texture into areas where the real tree didn't exist (like the arms, and my left foot). Then there are two copies of me- one desaturated and set to multiply, and then another with the blend mode set to normal. Everything else is done just by painting the layer masks for each of these two layers to allow texture from the underlying tree layer to come through.

Another huge thanks to Paul for allowing me to use his image as the basis for this image.

This is a composite of 3 photos. 2 exposures shot with tripod and ND8x grad filter, manually blended for the background, 1 for the portrait. Portrait shot in studio with 400ws strobe at camera right with large gridded softbox, triggered with pocket wizards. Composited in Photoshop, 8 layers total.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of playing host to my friend Giuseppe Parisi, who came to stay with my wife and I during his vacation in California. It was a blast getting to spend time hanging out with a friend that I have known for so long through flickr, but never met face to face.

During the trip Giuseppe and my father also got a chance to spend some time together, and I took the opportunity to practice a new technique that Giuseppe taught me, which I think is called the Brenizer technique.

This image is composed of 20 shots take at 135mm at f/2.8, which is what gives the image that shallow depth of field.

Obviously I didn't take this photo- copyright belongs to Jeff Thomas.

This is a shot from the now concluded production of Jesus Christ Superstar, in which I was honored to have played the role of Jesus Christ.

Without a doubt the most amazing experience of my life. An amazing cast, crew and directors made this show one of most successful productions in the 40 year history of the SRJC performing arts department.