MOVED MY BLOG!

Moved my blog.  This one is obsolete.

 

WWW.MEREKDAVIS.COM

 

HIT IT!

Lots o traffic

One of my photos was linked in an article on a pretty large site for designers (webdesignerdepot.com) and they linked directly to this blog. Unfortunately, they didnt link to my actual photography/design site.

So here it is.  And thank you for taking the time to visit!

www.Boomshotstudios.com

ps – I’m back from europe and have a gang of pictures and journals that i need to update.  in due time.  Life has been busy.

Europe ho!

I’m off to Europe for a few weeks. Be sure to checkup on here a I’ll be trying to publish the days findings.

We are driving through Germany Austria Switzerland an France.

Whooooeee. Wish us luck.

Updating your wordpress on the iPhone kinda sucks. Can’t wait to bust out the computer.

Till neztime. Love you all.

Merek

In Sacramento

Doing a shoot up there.  I’ll be back in a few to really update this bloggy.

Sorry my updates have been less than par lately.  I’ve been incredibly busy this past month and havent had a chance to update this thing.  But I should have some time within the next week or two to get some new posts on here.

I’m tired and sleepy and my flight has been delayed an hour.  I hate sitting in airport terminals.  Some exciting news is coming in the next week or so.  I have some new ventures.

Until then, hope you’re all doing well!

Ah crap. Got behind again – Behind the Scenes Sunday (or monday)

Well for good reason this time, I got really really behind.  I’ve been busy working on a couple pretty rad projects.  This is the part where I get to be really really vague about what I’ve been doing as to make it seem much more interesting.  I just finishes up a page spread for AP magazine for an incredible band, CD art for another band, a marketing campaign for another band, prepped the storyboard for a music video, getting ready to shoot said video, and a crap load of other band shoots.  I understand “crap load” isn’t the best terminology to use, but its pretty descriptive in the amount of work I’ve been given.  Extremely extremely blessed.

 

Ok, so for today’s behind the scenes stuff.  I have had a couple ideas that I’ve been brewing up and I needed to get some test shots for the idea.  I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by really good looking friends, so it’s easy to snag someone for some test shots.  The feeling I wanted to capture was dirty, gritty, sexy, and classy.  An awkward combination, especially in explaining to one of your closest guy friends.

“Dude, so the shot I’m doing of you is going to be dirty and gritty and you’re going to look sexy.”  

“Sexy?”

This was the end result of the “dirgritsexclassy” look I wanted to achieve:

My friend Trevor was the first one I thought of for this shoot.  I needed someone who could pull of a serious more mature look, and I thought he was perfect for it.  Granted, If any of you know Trevor, he’s the farthest person from being serious and one of the most chill human beings I’ve ever met. I had Trevor go out and get a suit that he wouldn’t mind getting dirty and he couldn’t of picked a better one.  It was perfect.

I have a secret spot that I like to use for these test shots.  There’s quite a few different organic looks that I can achieve from this one location, and I’m sure there’s a lot more that I haven’t discovered yet.  I felt that it would work quite well for the overall mood of this shot.  It might look a little familiar from other shoots.

Now, onto all the “on location” goodies.

I needed Trevor’s skin to look sweaty/glossy to create a dramatic pre/post action shot.  The best way to do that? I had him cover his face and arms in vegetable oil.  It’s nasty, and hard to get off, but it does wonders for skin reflection and skin definition.  I dumped a good amount of water into his hair for sweat effect, and then used a special technique to create sweat droplets on his face and arms.  It’s a pretty easy ingredient…Just think of a product that creates manageable “water” beads.

Now blood.  There’s tons of recipes for fake blood out there, and honestly, everyone of them is good for different applications.  My favorite recipe involved a lot of chocolate syrup and a couple other secret ingredients.  NOTE:  Fake blood can either looks REALLY good, or horribly bad.  I’ve made some horrible blood in the past that came out almost neon red.  The darker, the better.  If it comes out too dark, then you have a great liquid mud to work with  Now, I do fake blood a lot different.  I actually prefer a much more red color because I can manipulate shine and color in photoshop better that way.  When you look at my before pictures, that’s not a “normal” fake blood color.  I use it as a guideline.

Applying fake blood is incredibly simple too.  dip the edge of a wadded up paper towel into your blood, and then press it on the spot you want it to DRIP from.  Example, if i want the look of a bloody nose, i press the edge up into the edge of his nostril and let it drop down.  Same with lips/head wounds.  Arms and hands get the splatter treatment.  Make sure not to overdo it.

His hand bandages we’re created by ripping an old shirt rolling them around in the mud and splattering with fake blood.

I needed dramatic but full soft lighting on the front so I used a beauty dish about 4 feet from the subject and the kicker light was about 8 feet behind the subject camera right. 

Here’s the light setup for some of the shots (click to enlarge):

 

So that’s basically it.  We shot for about a total of 15-20 minutes and then bounced.  The editing was pretty fun in accenting the droplets and sweat even more.  I wanted a post action shot, so I added some bruising in photoshop and a little more lip blood.  Tomorrow I’ll have some links to more goodies and tutorials for ya!

Before:

After:

 

Before:

After:

 

Before:

After:

 

Make sure to click on this one to view larger.  I love the texture of the water droplets.

 

 

The Author Photos/Media Kit

I apologize for my lack of updating as frequently as I wanted to.  I’ve been sick, so blogging is the last thing on my mind. Also, I love my iphone.  It is single handed saved me on so many occasions.

Alright, this isn’t a behind the scenes thing (that’s for Sunday, remember?) but this is blog worthy.  I just a complete media package for a band called The Author.  I’ve shot and worked with these guys a number of times.  My old band used to play shows with their old band.  They’re such good people. (You’ll also notice that almost any band I work with, I refer to as “good people.”  That’s because they are.)

I had a lot of fun with this because their singer wanted to take their art direction in a way that is in my comfort zone.  My comfort zone?  Grunge, dirty, sketches, and dead trees.  I love all of those things.  My new camera shoots 1080p video so I asked them if they wanted to do a little teaser promo for their new upcoming track.  As some of you know, I shoot and edit video at my day job.  Now it isn’t music video style, but it’s still a lot of fun, and I’m able to experiment and try new things.

This was a totally new experiment.

The shoot went great.  We shot at an….well.. i guess you could call it an abandoned orchard?

You can see the final product below:(click to enlarge!!!)

also an individual shot of one of the members:

So I shot some video that I was planning on using for a behind the scenes video, but I ended up creating that teaser promo using some of the footage.  The video is linked below.  Warning: Their music is heavy, and “screamy” as my friend said, but, they’re incredible musicians, and you just need to listen and appreciate what they’re doing.  Oh, and totally look at my work.

The Author from Merek Davis on Vimeo.

Now once that was all done, I created a myspace page that reflected the image from the photos: I took a screen shot of it below, but feel free to click through and check it all out.  I’m pretty proud of it.  It’s been almost a year since I coded a semi-custom myspace page.

http://www.myspace.com/theauthoraz

All in all, I loved doing this kind of work.  Being able to use a couple different mediums to pull an idea and a thought together is always exciting for me.  Coming up:  I’m going to start doing video tutorials of different photoshop things.  They’ll be on this site, and they’ll be for free.. so be looking forward to those in a few weeks.  And I apologize if this is riddled with grammatical errors. It’s late, I’m tired, and I just dont care to grammar check it right now.

The Cover Up

I had the great opportunity to work with the band The Cover Up on Modern Art/Epic Records a few months ago.  Some of the coolest, most humble genuine guys you’ll meet.  They’re music is pretty incredible.  I recommend going and taking a listen to them.  Pretty brutal music, and they put on an incredible show.  www.myspace.com/thecoverup.

For the shoot we wanted to do something controversial, memorable, and definitely something that probably would be frowned upon.  There are so many things that you could do that could fit that criteria, but I wanted to do something that the label would look at and not say, “uhm, no, absolutely not.  Take that down now.”

We came up with the idea of all of them dead from hanging.  I know, it’s not the most tasteful thing, but if you knew these guys, it works.  And I knew I could pull it off in a way that wouldn’t be too br00tal.

I needed the lighting to be as dimensional as possible due to the fact i was going to be adding layers and layers onto the composite, and a lot of the lighting was going to get muddied down.

I used a 4 light setup on this one.  Beauty dish overhead, large softbox camera right, and 2 kickers in smaller soft boxes for the upper torso:

After brainstorming how to make , the best idea would be to have someone stand on a ladder holding the rope tight:

For safety, the rope wasn’t really tied into a noose.  That was something I could create later in Photoshop.  The makeshift loop would put tension on the neck and pull it well enough before it would undo itself from the tension.  Safety knots are the only knots I know how to tie.

When I was ready to shoot, I’d count to three and the hangee(?) would jump.  At the same time, the one holding the rope would pull up.  Sometimes it’d briefly choke the person.  Oh well.  Realism, right?

The end result was this:

In hindsight, I definitely wouldn’t have used a black backdrop.  I figured since the composite was going to be dark, that’d be fine, but i also didnt anticipate all but one of them would wear black pants.  I got all the shoots, and everyone looked surprisingly dead via rope.  No weird faces, weird shadows.  Everything was great.

Once again, I’d prefer not to go into my editing techniques.  Secret secret!  The fun part came throwing it all together.  I like shooting composite because it gives me complete control over an image.  The downside is it’s composite.  Not real.  Fake. Bleh.  I love light…. I love light rays, reflection, fog, smog, dust, particles, etc.  I try to incorporate that into my work, and in this shot it was no exception.  I had a photo of an abandoned school that i thought would work perfectly.  On the left side of the hallway were big windows.  I perfect place for some dust particles!  I also needed to create a noose out of the rope we had as well.

In the final image.  There’s over 32 layers of just overlays over the image.  That includes my scribbles, drawing, text, typewriter, crumpled papers, sketches, etc….  There’s so many subtle things in this picture, I doubt you’ll ever notice most of them.  But that’s the fun.  The words are actually very significant to the overall image, and if you took the time to decipher them, then you would have too much time, and wouldn’t really be edified as much as you wanted.  There’s also some strong significance as to why only one of them is hanging onto his life in the picture and the rest are dead.  You can ask them about why that is.  They’ll be more than happy to tell you.

Final Image:(click to enlarge!)

Here’s another image from the same shoot:(click to enlarge)

Beauty Tutorial – Photoshop

Wow….I’m really enjoying doing this blog thing daily.  It’s exciting for me!  It’s making me stay up to date on other things as well. 

I’ve been busy with my latest project from a band called The Author.  They’re an amazing band and I’ve been able to work with them before on some past projects they’ve done as an other band.  They’re some of the nicest dudes and always fun to work with.  We shot at a great secret location with lots of dead stuff and tall grass.  (I’ll never share the location. Muhahaha.)   At the shoot, I was able to take some video footage of the shoot for some behind the scenes video.  I can’t recommend the Canon 5D mark II enough.  The video output on this thing is great.

Since I was designing their myspace page as well, I  thought it’d be fun to put together a teaser video for them using some of the behind the scenes footage.  I’ll be posting that within the next few days, as well as the photos.

Now onto the toot. (short for tutorial.  Also, another word for gas.)  Today’s toot comes from Deviantart.com.  When I first got into….whatever it is I do now, I was constantly on deviantart.  There is a huge resource of amazing talent over there.  All it takes is a couple of minutes before you’re overwhelmed with awesomeness.  Sign up, get an account, and make friends. (I should probably update my profile there…it’s been about 3 years?)  Let’s all admit it.  Sometimes we take really bad photos.  We can make a flattering person very unflattering.  Or we might notice that the makeup artist or model didn’t put enough makeup on the face and we need to add some in.

 

Here’s a tutorial that really helped me out when I first started tweaking photo’s.  Now I have a different work flow and editing techniques, but this is where I began and can be a nice helper for your arsenal.  Go check it out! It’s a life saver!  To download the file, on the left hand side of the site, you’ll see a little download button.  Just click that and start beautifying!

http://zoffie.deviantart.com/art/Photoshop-Beauty-Tutorial-57426750

Distress Effect Tutorial – Photoshop

The Ivy - 2008

http://www.computerarts.co.uk/tutorials/2d__and__photoshop/distressed_effects_in_photoshop

Alright, I’ve decided to make this a daily thing…posting and stuff.  So, during the week, I’m going to be posting my favorite tutorials, freebies, and other good stuff.  I’ve spent tons and tons of time researching all this stuff, and testing things out…so I’ll help you save some time.

By the way, Every Sunday will be now titled “Behind the Scenes Sunday.”  Catchy eh? I totally thought of it by myself.  Anyway, every Sunday will be a behind the scenes look on one of my shoots, or some of my before and after post work, and I MIGHT give some hints as to what I do, and why I do it.

I should create a whole schedule. Each day has it’s own creative witty little title that has to do with some aspect of……. something….. hmmmm…that was vague.

Anyway, back to today’s gift from me to you.  This has to do with grunge.  We love the distressed looks in our photos.  There’s a true art behind grunge.  Imperfections in a photo can add a personality that couldn’t be achieved by any other means.  I love dirtying, grunging, aging to perfection, and crushing images.  The Gears of War video games has some of the most incredible destroyed beauty I’ve ever scene in any art medium.  Like so:

Seriously?!?! Just look at how beautiful that is.  The crushed high’s, everything is destroyed! mmm…..  Ok, insider tip.  If you want to know where I get a lot of my ideas for shoots and colors, play Gears of War 1 and 2.  There you go.  There’s my million dollar secret. (If I was worth a million dollars of course.)

Unfortunately, none of those things can be achieved by pressing one button in photoshop, illustrator, cinema 4d, after effects, or any other program.  Some plugins might tell you that for X amount of dollars, you can have realistic creases and scratches by buying their plug in.  Bleh.  They’re all crap.   It takes time, understanding how the aging process works, and all sorts of subtle things that I don’t even really know how work., but they do.

el baile de la muerte - 2006

The only way to really truly get a grunge look, is to get if from things in real life.  This article from the website, Computer Arts based in the UK explains how to correctly use grunge textures in alpha channels.  They include some source files and well as a PDF tutorial to save for later!  Enjoy!

http://www.computerarts.co.uk/tutorials/2d__and__photoshop/distressed_effects_in_photoshop

Free Vector Packs From Bittbox

http://www.bittbox.com/freebies/exclusive-freebie-custom-designious-vector-pack-voted-on-by-you/

I love vectors.  You should too.  If you don’t know what a vector is, or what it’s used for, then you probably should just stop reading.  Your head will explode.

Bittbox is a great website and I’ve been following them for quite a while.  Last month they released a six free vector packs for download.

The pack I’m most excited about?  Seamless Baroque.  You can never have too much of this stuff.  Makes for great backgrounds for designs, composites, overlays, soft light layers, etc.  and it’s seamless!

I’d post a link to the direct download here, but you should head over to their site and check out what they have going on.  Download link is at the bottom of their article.  Enjoy!