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Commercial Product Photographer Chris Eltrich and Splashing Goggles!

Posted on July 16, 2013

Commercial Product Photographer Chris Eltrich has been playing with splashes to add some fun to his photography portfolio. His recent shoot included goggles and an aquarium. It was a day full of fun that ended with Chris dropping everything from lemons to bananas in the water to see which created the best splash. When it comes to focusing on the perfect splash, Chris offers some insight on how to get the job done:

The biggest challenge to the splash shot is the timing. Just capturing the splash is fairly challenging, but you want the product to look good too. You could, alternatively, take a bunch of shots and composite pieces together, but I wanted to get the splash and product in the same shot, so I needed a consistent method. Now at this point, a gear savvy photographer would begin assembling an elaborate system to trigger the camera when the product falls past a certain point, that you can tune to a fraction of a second. But as the jobs of my generation are slowly being appropriated by “the machines”, I decided to go all “John Henry” and show these machines we humans are still relevant.

I had my assistant drop the goggles about two feet above the water and I hit the shutter right before they landed. The first drop turned great, so I gave myself a congratulatory pat on the back (actually, I instructed my assistant to give me a congratulatory pat on the back.) Oh the joys of being a professional photographer. And so we began our day-long adventure in dropping things in an aquarium.

After a morning of getting great shots of goggles and receiving upwards of forty congratulatory pats on the back (so many that I ended up congratulating him with seven pats of his own), my timing abilities began to decline, and I started getting a lot of pictures of an empty tank or a pair of goggles floating.

Now some would fault me with not hitting the shutter at the right time, but I believe it was the machines, jealous of my amazing “early morning” timing, using some sort of time travel device or computer virus to stop me from getting amazing product photography consistently all day. Luckily, since I had already taken some shots that I loved in the morning we still felt like we had defeated the growing menace that is automation.

To view more of our Commercial Product Photography please click here!

Lifestyle Photographer Swinging Color!

Posted on September 4, 2012

Recently, Lifestyle Photographer Dana Jonas, decided she wanted to photograph the newest apparel line to hit the tennis world. She however, did not want this to be like any other shoot. Wanting to play with the lighting, she aspired to emulate the motion associated with the intense sport of competitive tennis. Read her thoughts below on this motion detecting light technique:

It’s been a while since I painted with light and I thought instead of fighting the motion (my first plan), I’d use it to my benefit! Luckily Studio 3 had this wonderful concrete wall built for a previous job that I thought would be a great backdrop for this idea. I set-up the Speedotron Black Line 2400ws strobes and a red gelled Mole-Richardson 2k continuous hot-light, which was carefully flagged off. I did this so that it would mostly fall on the racket as they were moving. I set the exposure to about 1 or 2 seconds depending on how long I needed for the trail and fired the Canon 5D MarkIII camera when they started moving. Then with the pocket wizards in hand, I fired the strobes manually at the end of the swing so the red trail would be behind the tennis racket from the direction they were swinging. Had I fired the strobe at the beginning of the exposure, the red trail would have been in front of the motion, which visually wouldn’t make any sense at all. This shoot was a blast and required some coordinated button-pushing and obviously very talented tennis models! Truly makes a photographer understand that their tool is not a camera, it’s light. I can’t wait to try this again with a different color. Any suggestions on the color I should work with?

To view more Lifestyle images created at Studio 3 please click here!

Bike Photography In Two Styles!

Posted on June 1, 2012

Seattle and Portland are in the nation’s top ten bike friendly cities, so it’s no surprise our photographers are inspired by the environmentally friendly mode of transportation, therefore they get their bike photography on. Dana Jonas and Chris Eltrich teamed up to play out their personal strengths, with Dana shooting bicyclist Eddie and Chris shooting the fun color inspired product shots, it was a bike to remember. While Chris shot his series in studio, Dana chose a pier on Green Lake and here are her thoughts on bike photography:

I chose to shoot on a pier in Green Lake to have the option of creating the element of surprise. My goal was to have the viewer take a second look, like: what, wait, wow…is that guy riding on water? The model was great, seeing eye to eye on my vision. He even got so intense as making himself hyperventilate to look authentic. It was a great team and match up, I am definitely loving the fun visual result!

Check out the lifestyle bike photoshoot below: