Portrait Photography

Greetings good humans and welcome Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we do some activities that are only hobby desk adjacent in my apartment and we find out whether or not we’ve wasted our time trying something new. And we thank our patrons for bearing with us during this niche-specific digression and bout of self daring!

So, for anyone new here, yes, this channel is typically dedicated to tabletop hobby stuff, as the intro implies. But recently I took on a little creative project that is … genre – adjacent let’s say. Meaning it has swords in it, and that’s about it. But I often encourage folks to follow their dreams, and I had to be ballsy and follow my own advice.

Also, when I started this channel, I reserved the right to, once in a while, just delve into something that interests me in the spirit of discovery and avoiding single topic burnout. So the ride sometimes veers off-track. But you know it always circles back eventually. And sometimes off-roading is fun.

So today we’re going to take a look at the results of that photo shoot <snap> and talk about some things related to processing photos, trying to make “art”, I don’t know, we’re just gonna look at and work on some photos.

Now that footage at the opening of the video is from the morning after the shoot. I set up a camera and I recorded my entire five hour session where I initially went through all the pics. Yes, talking to a camera like I was on a live stream. By myself. Yes, sometimes I question my sanity too. I kind of dared myself to do it, cause I was pretty worried I might have genuinely wasted everybody’s time and energy on that project.

But, I’m relieved to say that, at least from my perspective, overall for a first attempt at staged photography, I think we got some cool stuff. Anyone else might disagree, of course, this being an artistic endeavor, all opinions are valid.

Let’s take a look at some of the raw photos and then I’ll show you a couple of the treated ones. 

So let’s take a look at the process… Processing? Let’s look at the process of treating an image. Now I’m not gonna bore you with all the time-consuming details, like I said, there are thousands of videos about skin retouching, photoshop effects, stuff like that. But I can show you what I’ve done to a couple of photos by going through the layers I’ve created in building the final look. And you can see just how infinitely subjective this whole process is.

Of serious note is how long it takes me to post process one of these pics. It takes me hours. I’m getting faster with practice, but still, holy cow.

And I’ve been watching a ton of YouTube tutorials and learning way more about Photoshop than I ever thought I would. The interesting and frankly kind of overwhelming thing about this whole post processing activity is similar in some ways to sitting at the hobby desk with a freshly primed miniature. The possibilities are endless. You could literally do a 1000, nay a million different things. To be honest, there’s probably way more things you can do to a photo in Photoshop than things you can do to a miniature, but you get what I’m saying. You’ve got that monochromatic mini in hand and think, all right, what color do I start with, and you look over at your paints and you’ve got 100 different choices staring back at you. Right?

So I used the star rating system in Lightroom Classic to organize the photos, doing multiple passes and whittling down my selections to what I’ve categorized as the 4-star images, which is the collection of images I’ve determined are cool enough to work on. Now, out of my original 623 files I’ve slapped 70 with 4 stars and I still constantly go back and forth on some. Once I start working on a photo, it goes into the five star folder, so I can keep track of what I’ve worked on and what I haven’t.

All right, here’s one of the few medium shots I did, cause mostly I was shooting pretty wide to get full bodies in frame and I just did not have enough time to get closeups on top of everything else.  

I always start treating a photo here in Lightroom, I do some basic color correction and some very minor tweaks, and you can see in this photo there’s no smoke in the pipe. But that’s fine, cause hey, we’re gonna use Photoshop to pull the smoke from this previous shot and it’ll be perfect. 

After those basic tweaks in Lightroom I send the image to Photoshop and that’s where I do most of the work. Here you can see I added the smoke from that other shot straight away and merged the layers. I should have probably kept it separate, but, well, you know, we’re living and learning.

So the first thing I do is the blemish removal pass. All this stuff has one rule – subtlety is king. Like you could remove every freckle on a person but that isn’t what we want. The blemish pass and the next step are by far the two most time-consuming and tedious steps in the whole process. 

After the blemish removal comes the standard frequency separation thing and this where we smooth out the colors of the skin underneath the actual skin texture – again, thousands of video tutorials on that whole process out there on YouTube. 

Then I do some dodging and burning – which just means brightening or darkening – to further even out the skin – again, a very standard procedure – and I can also add any shadows and highlights I feel like putting in there. Like I touched up some of the highlights and shadows on the hat to even out some of the ripples in the texture. Again, pretty subtle stuff.

I also used some dodging to make her eye pop and then to make it pop even more, I went in with some layers to brighten and add saturation to the iris, again, trying not to go overboard but it’s all subjective choices right? And that’s large part of the time that goes into one of these edits – for me anyway – because I can sit here and look at different color treatments over and over and tweak it this way and that way and which is better and I don’t know and … well, it can just get overwhelming.

So then I masked just the hat so I could darken it a bit. I don’t know why, it just felt like making it darker would add more richness maybe? I don’t know.

And then I learned about contouring, which is something anyone who puts on makeup already knows all about! And there’s a ton of tutorials on that, but essentially it’s just a map of where to enhance highlights and deepen shadows on a human face. This is something I thought, wow, okay, I’ll be using this when painting miniature faces from now on. Actually, I can use all of this stuff when painting miniatures, because in the end, we’re ultimately just playing with contrast and color, and whether that’s in a photograph or on a miniature or in a painting, it’s all the same concept. 

So you can see what the contouring layers do to Laura’s skin here. Since I learned about this technique, I’ve started to use it in all kinds of places, not just the skin tones. You’ll see that in a second.

So that takes care of Laura, but now we gotta do the background. So I masked Laura and then started playing with the background to just find something that looked cool, felt cohesive and maybe make the whole thing more dramatic.

I tweaked the overall color of the background with this color balance layer and then darkened it with a curves layer. And then I just wasn’t digging the plain backdrop I had on set, but I can’t get myself to entirely replace a background, I’m just not good enough with photoshop yet to take something like that on and not make it look stupid. So I brought in a graphic with flowers I bought on etsy, which looks crazy of course, until you change that blend mode. I used the Multiply mode and that makes it settle nicely into the existing backdrop. In my opinion.

Then I added a radial gradient in black and white and set it to the soft light blend mode to kind of both separate Laura from the background and kind of replicate the actual flash hitting the backdrop.  

Then I applied a gradient map layer to color shift the background – and I literally just learned about this technique too a few weeks ago – and then I applied that same gradient map over the whole image but lowered to like a 70 percent opacity. 

Now I could go on and on and on messing with colors and contrast and shadows and highlights and backgrounds, I could literally mess with this photo for a year if I wanted to. This is what I mean about having too much possibility, it’s just nuts. But, at some point, we gotta move on!

So here’s the before and the after. My one artistic goal at the beginning of this whole project was I wanted to try to achieve this “painterly portrait” look that’s all the rage. I think that look just sorta jives with the costume aspect and so that’s been like my guiding keyword during this post processing phase. Whether I’ve been successful or not is really not up to to me to decide lol.

All right, let’s look at another one, which just might be one of the best images I’ve ever been lucky enough to have a hand in creating, with a lotta help.

So this is Lily and she just squatted down in that awesome dress Debradawn gave her and everything literally  just worked here. (lightroom footage) Her look and the tipped over cup she did on her own and the smoke element, all captured in camera in one shot, just super cool. In my opinion of course. (possibly cut to the reaction footage)

So I did the first round of tweaking in Lightroom, which got it to this point and then I sent it over to Photoshop.

The first thing I did in Photoshop was – well, I did it at some point in the middle of the process but it’s just easier to show you at the beginning here. I widened the image a bit and used the AI generative fill to stretch the background and it recreated the smoke at the edge pretty nicely.

There’s the original so you can see how much I extended it. Just makes it a better composition to my eye.

Here’s the healing slash blemish removal layer, I did that process and cleaned up the backdrop a little bit, cause my backdrop on set was full of creases from shipping.

Then I did the frequency separation and color smoothing, followed by some very tiny dodging and burning on the skin. I was working on such tiny areas you can’t even see the difference unless I zoom way in.

Then the contouring, which makes quite a difference. You can see I added some highlights to her hair and just sorta made her pop overall. 

Then some contouring on the wardrobe, again just to add some contrast and almost a glow to the highlights. But again, trying to remember subtle is the keyword, right?

This color match layer is just a layer where I used the Color blending mode to paint over some subtle color differences in different areas to make any color differences less noticeable, again, virtually impossible to see but here you can see the results pretty clearly with the purple shadow on the scarf. 

And then a final pop on her eyes with a curves adjustment layer and then she gets masked and we go to work on the background, just like in the last image.

I didn’t like these wisps of smoke up above her head, I thought they were distracting in the final image, so I tried to remove them. I had to add some brightening to get this big crease out and then some darkening (aka dodging and burning, right?) and then I wanted to pop the smoke a little bit, so that’s done with a curves adjustment layer, again, just more “dodging”.

And then I color shifted the whole background into the bluer side with a selective color layer – again, this is something you can just infinitely tweak.

I wanted to add some dramatic lighting and kill as much of that crappy background as I could, so a vertical gradient in overlay blend mode worked for that. I realize this probably sounds like a lot technical jargon but I think visually seeing what’s happening just kind of shows you that I’m basically just working on this thing like’s a painting – or a coloring book.

The last thing I had to correct was this little patch of smoke bursting around her arm which just had a weird color cast to it, so I had to paint over it with some blue in the color blend mode to get it to match a little better.

And now the most fun part, which is the global effects, stuff that’s gonna affect the entire image as a whole because we have a fairly coherent image to work with after all that previous stuff.

I started with a gradient map, you can see how it shifts the colors, basically it applies the colors in the gradient to the shadows and the highlights of the image and I think it looks pretty great, and basically everything is frosting at this point.

Now a very subtle shift in the whites, which are essentially just the highlights on her skin, I just made them a little more cream colored and a little less blue, again, super subtle. I mean based on YouTube compression you may not see any change at all.

Some curves adjustments darken the overall image and then this Lookup Table from inside Photoshop, some kind of fuji film emulator, I don’t know, there’s bunch and I just kinda slide through them until I find one I like. I don’t always use these but this time, this one worked pretty well. And this layer is only set to 25% opacity. 

And then one final layer, another look up table set to teal and orange, again something I just stumbled on and thought, wow, that is cool for how crazy the color is. And that’s the cherry on top. I really like how this one came out, I think it’s pretty rad!

And now something I do with pretty much every photograph is I wanna check it out in black and white. And you might think this is just a simple turn off the color sorta thing but there’s as much variation in black and white as you have in color, it’s crazy.

For example, just the black and white filter in the standard photoshop adjustment layer has these presets that all look pretty different. 

I’ve found that I typically like this weird formula that I’ll tweak on a per image basis. I use a combination of the infrared preset and the Green preset, two different layers masked to see the effects of one here and the other there.

But I think this image works super well in black and white too! I love it! And I don’t think I can pick a favorite between the color version and the black and white, I like both quite a bit! 

Okay, how about we just take a quick look at one more that I think works far better in black and white than it does in color.

This one, once I dropped it into black and white, I was like whoa, this is badass in black and white! I mixed a couple of the black and white presets again, using the infrared layer for her dress and then masking it back out to the brighter green preset layer to make all those folds in the dress pop.

All right, just like at the end of a mini painting video, here’s some of the images I’ve completed. Some of these have color and black and white variants and while I think all of these are looking pretty cool at the moment, I’ve noticed that every time I look at quote finished unquote photo a day or two later, I see something I want to change. 

So overall I’m chalking this whole project up in the Win column. There’s quite a few images I’m pretty proud of. And it took a bunch of other talented artists to help me get there, so I just keep hoping they’re all gonna dig the results as much as I do. And you’re seeing all kinds of different color treatments here and some backgrounds have images or textures added, and all I can say is I’m just having fun experimenting. I have no idea what I’m doing, other than just letting myself eat all the crayons in the box! 

I actually really like quite a few of the images from this shoot in black and white and, well, if you follow me on instagram, you’ll be able to see ’em as I release ’em. Which reminds me, I’ve been wrestling with this quandary of where to share the results of this project. Like, every marketer in the world would tell me to absolutely not clutter my miniature painting Tabletop Alchemy instagram with portrait photos. And they’d be right from a certain perspective. But dammit, I’m interested in too many things and I wanna do them all and I don’t wanna like have to run separate social media accounts for every little thing, which would be dumb anyway because I just don’t do like one thing all the time. 

Like, my brand, if I have such a thing, is probably at its core all about not having a brand – or singular niche anyway. It’s about engaging in all kinds of creative stuff. As long as there are swords involved, that’s a common thread, right? So at least I roll with a common theme. Sometimes. 

Anyway, let me know what you think of these pics or anything else! And, uh, go do something off-brand, cause what the hell, you gonna miss out on doing something you wanna do just cause other folks – or algorithms – think you should stay in a box? You decide.

See ya!

So I often serve up pep talks in one form or another on this channel, all geared towards encouraging folks to be creative and not only get stuff done but to try new things they may have considered but never pulled the trigger on. And my own personal view of philosophical concepts is that they are best when they’re universal. Meaning, for example, “sit in the chair” <snap> can pertain to many things in life beyond a hobby desk or gaming table.

And sure, I often squeeze or stretch stuff to make it pertain to our hobby but that’s because they can, and  they do.

So this time I’m putting my money where my mouth is and I am taking my own advice and I am tackling something new to me and I’m getting something done. And, of course, who would I be if I didn’t bring you along with me?

Intro

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes I take you on a field trip that’s only vaguely related to tabletop gaming! And we thank our patrons for their considered and sophisticated indulgence.

One quick note here, there’s gonna be a lot of b-roll that has no audio because I played real music in the studio even though I knew that’d be a problem for YouTube. It was a photo shoot, c’mon man, we had to have some cheesy get-in-the-vibe tunes. Right? I mean, that’s what they do in all the videos I’ve seen of photo shoots. 

So this whole thing started, well, to be perfectly honest, it probably started back in 2013. I had wrapped up my little cheesy fantasy dungeons and dragons inspired, no budget web series and one of my actors was asking me about season two. I had written up an outline, so I knew two things: season two would require real money and real locations. And thus, I was never confident we’d get to do a season two.

Trust me, when I spout off with advice on this channel, I do so well aware of how difficult it is to follow any kind of advice.

Anyway, my actor friend, who had moved to Sacramento, had found a winery there that is essentially a real castle, and they do rent out to productions, like I know Disney has rented that place before. So we went to check it out and they gave us a tour. Now, the third act centerpiece in my season two was something I’ve never stopped wanting to do, cinematically-speaking: a masquerade ball that devolves into a pitched sword fight and magic battle, with a heist running in the background D&D style.

And on another hand, I’ve always really liked photography, but I’ve only ever shot, you know, like candids and landscape type stuff. I’ve always wanted to shoot portraits, but I’ve never had any confidence to try such a thing.

I still don’t have any confidence, I’m just old now and have fewer fucks left to give.

One thing is, I’m pretty introverted. Life has tried to beat that out of me but it’s definitely a core stat. Or flaw, as the case usually is with my core stats. So, one on one with a person I don’t know, that’s a tough deal, couple that with a lack of experience, self doubt, self consciousness –

You see how all this “self” nonsense kind of adds up to form a kind of narcissism, like in some kind of inverted way? Yeah, so do I.

Anyway, I never tried portrait photography and I’ve never tried flash photography and I’ve just always wanted to learn how to do it. Now a lot of people I know are quick to point out things like, “dude, you shoot video all the time. You work with clients and actors and subjects all the time, it’s the same thing. What are you worried about?”

And it’s hard to explain that it really isn’t the same thing. It’s in the ballpark yes but it ain’t the same game. In our tabletop hobby terms, it might be like having speed painted armies forever and then deciding to try out painting a bust or display model.

But back to D&D and photography. I really like certain aesthetics. One of those is obviously swords and high fantasy fashion. Duh.

So with this idea of the masquerade ball scene never quite leaving the back burner – and yeah, it’s still bubbling back there – another friend of mine was making a stop motion feature film in his garage, and one of the actors he hired to do some voiceover was our mutual friend, Debradawn Shockey, who is not only a fantastic actress, but is also an incredible wardrobe designer.

Look, she help me do these! <insert freelancers clip, insert Dust and blood clip>

So I was hit with this idea to do a photo shoot with Debradawn and women in medieval dresses with swords. Yeah, I know how original that is, you ain’t gotta tell me. I also have an idea for a companion series, but we ain’t gonna talk about that right now.

So I called her up –  

And so earlier this summer – which was 2023 if you’re watching this in the future – we all crewed up on a TV show production and neither Debradawn nor I had forgotten this photo shoot thing, so we planned it out.

On our TV production, we met … Lily Luque … and on a whim I was like, hey Lily, would you be up for doing make up for a photo shoot? And Debradawn was like, hey, Lily, would you be up for modelling for us too?

Lily was a little taken aback by that, but she walked that plank in the end cause she’s gracious and badass – 

Now something I’d originally asked Debradawn back at the beginning was if she could also find me a couple of actresses to shoot. Debradawn is heavily involved in the community theater scene, so I figured she might know some folks. Plus, I work with actresses but I’ve never worked with models.

Hey – introvert with a lack of confidence, we done talked about this, remember?

So Debradawn found a couple actresses and she herself would be my third model. Good to go. But you know what the universe does – it takes your plans and laughs at you. Right in your face, every time. But at a certain point, or a certain age anyway, you just expect it. And you suit up and ready yourself for battle/get ready to go to guns, ‘cause that’s what it feels like every time.

So, I had the crew all on board, I had Debradawn, Lily, a third actress, my friend Jared to assist me and my production partner Brad to help on set and shoot some BTS while we did whatever we were going to do. I scheduled the studio, everyone was good for the date, and then two weeks out our main actress couldn’t make the date through no fault of her own. Of course, right?

But another thing we learn about the universe is it likes to pull the rug out from under us so it can give us a gift. That always happens and you just gotta have faith, you gotta keep moving forward, you gotta show the universe you ain’t stopping so you can receive that gift. You got a look up at the sky and say, “What else you got? I’m hungry.”

So, I started asking around, trying to keep the franticness out of my voice, and we go through a bunch of almost-maybes, and the main photo session slot is still empty.

Then I remember we used to use this site called Breakdown Express to cast actors in our projects years ago. It’s called Actors Access on the actor side. Now, you’re probably thinking – if this guy works all the time in this industry, how does he not know people? Well, I used to but of course there’s a story there that I’ll tell you one day. Anyway, our old account was defunct so I had to make a new one and had to jump through some hoops to get verified so I could post the gig and this is now like seven days out from our studio rental date. 

And wouldn’t you know it: I got over 200 submissions in 24 hours. I’m sure the SAG strike had a little something to do with that.

Anyway, I ended up meeting Laura Dromerick through that process. And you know the universe is helping you out when your top choice not only responds right away with her availability, but turns out to play D&D as well. Get the hell outta here, right? Come on!

<Insert clips of Laura, talking, D&D>

And on top of all that, Laura is super cool, gung ho, fun to work with, and talented. And those are the four most important facets you want in a collaborator. She fit right in with our group, although I’m positive she’s used to much higher quality sets.

So, what’s it like trying to pull off a day where you’ve clearly bitten off more than you can chew?

Here are some things to note when you’re putting together a project. When you’re putting together a project, you’re producing. And when you’re also directing that project, you’re also directing. Most indy or low budget or no budget creators are doing this all the time. And it’s tough. But, you know, if you want to do anything, it’s going to be tough.

Mostly what I was trying to do throughout the day was:

1 – make sure the other folks helping me produce this thing had their space and time protected so they could do their thing.

2 – make sure we stuck to our schedule as best we could, which is always a top imperative, at least to me.

3 – do my best to protect my actual shooting windows, of which there were for one hour blocks. Meaning, I really wanted those hours to be all about working with the talent and firing those flashes.

And to do that last one, well, the first thing you gotta do is try to plan. And a big part of that is making the schedule. And the things you cannot forget when making the schedule is lunch and prep time.

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to pull off the day. There’s always two things at war in a creative project – the producer and the creative. Now I don’t mean to imply that actual producers and creatives are in battle with each other, even though that happens sometimes. In fact, there’s no better pair of allies on a project than a hard-core producer and a great creative. What I mean is most creative projects is a battle between efficiency and creativity – or the creative process maybe. And when you’re wearing both hats, well, you’re playing solo skirmish against yourself.

Some things I did prior to the shoot include:

Not only thinking about, but acting out some of the poses I thought I wanted to shoot. And from this, I generated a shot list of sorts.

I set up and ran tests with the flash equipment because I’d never used it before. This involved setting up soft boxes and umbrellas and light stands and diffusion panels and reflectors in my apartment, and making sure I knew how to operate the remote flash trigger with my camera.

I thought through the day quite a bit, and tried to imagine all of the details of the production in order to make the schedule. And I tell you what, nothing screwed up my schedule more than figuring out when to work in that damn lunch! Here’s the schedule I sent out to the crew and talent, in case you’re curious.

Now on the actual shoot day we all worked really hard to try to stay on that schedule. And I have a tendency to sacrifice some creativity in order to hit my days. Some would argue that this is not how an artist is successful. And I might agree. I generally always want people I’m around to be happy, and I’ll tend to forgo sometimes my own artistic or creative desires if it’s gonna cause discomfort to someone else. I really struggle with it, believe me.

So once a day starts, it’s always a whirlwind. You just gotta go to work and let everything you spent time thinking about sort of percolate on the back burner and focus on the tasks at hand.

We unloaded five cars worth of gear into the studio. That sounds dramatic and it was. But one car just had this crazy chair Debradawn had and one car was just Lily’s make up gear, but the other three cars were packed to the gills so you couldn’t even see through the rearview mirror. Not recommended by the way – and probably illegal in most states.

Once we had everything set up, my first model, Debradawn, became my first test subject. And I cannot overstate how completely out of my element I felt. Like I said, I’ve literally never taken a flash photo of someone before, let alone someone who has put time and immense effort, along with a bunch of others, into a project and who is trusting me to not waste her time or make her look bad it. “Freaky” is an understatement.

But because I did my tests at home, I had something to kind of rely on, so I just did what I always do. You just gotta jump off the diving board, results be damned. So we started shooting and I tried to remember all the things I’d been studying and wanted to do and, well, we just shot a bunch of pics.

Debradawn makes most of her wardrobe with the ability to add and subtract pieces, so that looks can be pretty versatile, which is awesome.  

Now again – I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s definitely one thing to watch a bunch of tutorials and a whole other thing to do the thing yourself. But it’s also the cool part, right? I mean, we were doing the thing!

Like this, I used this little micro fogger exactly one time – a few days before when it showed up in the mail. I knew I wanted to use that pipe I got in at the Ren faire and this silver chalice thing I got on Etsy as props and I thought maybe both the pipe and the cup might look cool with smoke coming out of them. Figuring I could use this little fogger on miniature photos, I bought it and tried it out once beforehand to make sure I knew how it worked. And it worked pretty well on set!

When Laura arrived Debradawn and Lily got her made up and dressed up and we started shooting with her in the red dress. I pretty much let Debradawn just choose the wardrobe she wanted to use, and I took care of props. And then we just tried to get as many shots as we could. 

Which is not necessarily the best way to do things, but I realize that’s kind of just how I work. As much as I want to be a “planner” and know exactly what I want ahead of time, I just don’t. I definitely have ideas, but a lot of the time I have to see something to know if I dig it or not.

Anyway, Laura was super fun to work with, and game to try all my dumb ideas and added her own too. And Debradawn would jump in there every couple of shots to add something like earrings or change something like hey how about this sheet of gold cloth, which at first I was kind of horrified by, but in the end she knew what she was doing it, because it actually looks really cool on camera.

After our first hour of shooting with Laura was up, we broke for lunch, which Brad had to drive an hour for, and then Laura got into the green dress for a second look Debradawn had picked out for her and we got right back into it. 

For the second look, I asked Lily if she could mess up Laura’s eye make up, smudge it up and … 

Let me call out my two buddies here too, Brad and Jared, they had my back the whole day. Brad owns black bunny media, which is basically our day job where we produce video for all kinds of clients, and he spent the day shooting behind the scenes for you and me. And Jared was essentially my right hand out there on set, moving lights, running the smoke machine, swapping props, making sure talent didn’t fall down on our ridiculously slippery floor, helping Debradawn with all her stuff, he’s always there when you need him, which you know is a priceless thing to find in an individual.

So we had this crazy cool chair Debradawn brought – in Jared’s car actually – and we did some shots with Laura in that and at the end of that sequence, I asked Laura what she would do in the chair. And that’s what I’m talking about! Being creative, being fun, being willing to try weird stuff, game on!

Then we lost the chair, which means we removed it from the set, and I switched up the sword. Now that sword, which is currently dull, used to be razor-sharp, and it is for all intents and purposes a genuine weapon. It’s really well-made, probably one of the coolest things I own. And there’s a fairly terrible story about this sword that maybe I’ll talk about one day.

But anyway, we did some more poses with that sword and we went back to the rapier and we did a bunch more stuff. And in the last five minutes Laura was going to be on set, we tried out that boot on the camera shot.

And then it was time for Lily, who came out of the green room all decked out in the blue princess dress and promptly showed me her shoes and said look I brought my Lacey shoes to go with your lace and blades photo shoot! Which I thought was super cool. Because Lace & Blades is the working title I put on all the call sheets and emails and the Breakdown Express ad. I know it’s a silly title but you gotta have some kinda working title, right, so that’s what it was.

Now, just like me, Lily hasn’t done this sort of thing on camera before and she was telling me how she needed some direction. 

Now this is the last hour of the day and I’m well aware that we have a hard out on the studio rental and we’ve got 7 acres of stuff to pack up and the clock is ticking.

We hadn’t used this katana I’d brought yet, so I started her with that. I feel pretty bad because by that time of the day I was failing her I think. I really wish I just had more time – but we’ll talk about the things I learned from the whole experience in just a bit.

So I brought a cheapie fan and so we tried that out – which was cool but now I know why you really need a powerful fan to move someone’s hair around. Then we switched props so we could have fun getting more poses and shots. 

One of the best pics I got was Lily playing up her reaction to an empty wine cup.

OK, I know one of the most frustrating things about this video is, I’m not showing you any of the actual photos. There are a couple of reasons. One is that that’s how it was on set. We didn’t really look at any pics other than on the back of the camera. And that’s how it is for most of the low budget shoots we do. We have to wait ’til we get home to dump footage – or in this case photos – to a home computer to review at full resolution and see what we captured. Of course, on bigger budget productions you have monitors and ways to check what you’re doing as you go but that wasn’t this project.

The second reason is that reviewing and working on the photos is definitely worth its own video. There are some surprising correlations between miniature painting and photo post-processing and things I’m learning from one that apply to the other.

So yeah, I’m just a tease. 

But on set, we finished Lily’s session with that bastard sword – which is the technical nomenclature, even though it’s also called a hand and a half sword, because you can operate it with one or two hands.

And that was it – 

All right, so some final thoughts. I think everyone had fun – and we got some, uh, well, I didn’t know what to expect from the photos but I desperately hoped I got at least one cool photo to make the day worth it. 

That’s facetious of course – even if I’d shot total garbage, the experience was worth it. There’s plenty of stuff for me to take away from the experience, but probably the biggest thing is actually just the experience itself. I’m super happy I did it. 

And of course I learned a bunch through this experience – I told you, gaining XP left and right, double XP on failures. I learned quite a few things that are photo session specific, of course, and I’ll learn even more when I go through the pics. But one thing I learned is that, yeah, I think I like shooting portraits, or at least doing studio photography. I mean, I have no desire to shoot like normal family portraits or corporate headshots at all but the act of taking staged photos, I think I really connected with it. I already wanna do it again. 

I love working with the costumes and props and talent, it’s just too cool. I learned that I would prefer to shoot only one or two models on a day with two hour windows blocked out instead of single hour windows, so I’ll know that for next time. I don’t need nearly as much gear as I thought I did, so that’s good to know. I don’t think I like just shooting into a plain backdrop as much as if we’d decorated an entire set, but that said, I still need to try taking photos on a location, which has it’s own batch of logistic issues. But I could go on and on about stuff I learned on that day.

Ultimately, while planning and researching and studying is a super important part of any project, I think the most important thing is just doing the thing, whatever it is. That’s where all the value lies. 

And of course, someone will say, well it’s easy for you do something, you got all this equipment yada yada yada but hey, I got into filmmaking with a point and shoot home video camera, that’s what I started with. Yes today I had a bunch of resources I tapped for this little project, but a lot of the time, it’s easier to lean on any kind of excuse not to do something than it is to pony up, drop your cards on the table and actually do a thing – trust me, I know that intimately and fall victim to my own excuses every damn day. 

The point is, the reward for trying something new, even if the first attempt is outright failure, is gaining experience, and gaining experience just might be the only thing of actual value in this life. 

I don’t know, I’m just a crazy old dude on the internet.

See ya!