Welcome to AON Imagery!
My intent for this blog is to share my shooting and editing process. Include some behind the scenes information about how I do what I do. Let’s get started.
For my preliminary portfolio at Algonquin College, we were assigned to shoot a self portrait. I decided to combine my editing and composite skills with my love of nighttime photography. Above is the final image I'll be showing my work process for.
THE SHOOT
LOCATION
Photography at night presents a few challenges, namely working in the dark. I chose Ottawa's Mer Bleue Bog for my location, and went to scout for a place to shoot close to the parking lot or path. My goal was to figure out how I was going to frame my image so when I came to shoot I would be prepared. This is probably one of the worst photos I have ever taken.
I liked the picnic table and distant pines. It would give me somewhere to sit as well as a dark frame to work on.
PORTRAIT
I decided to take the photo of myself during the day, as working with the all the required lights and equipment would be too difficult to work with at night. My friend Olivia came with me as assistant. We set up two Profoto B1s. I used a CTO gel on the main light so I'd get an interesting warm/cool contrast on the portrait. Because I had to fire the shutter myself for the assignment, I manually set focus to the picnic table then attached an intervalometer to fire my camera's shutter every 15 seconds.
NIGHT
I returned at 7pm a few days later with my friend Brennan to shoot the night scene. The first step was to as accurately as possible set the camera in the same spot as the day I shot the portrait. We brought a Profoto B1 light, and used a couple techniques to illuminate the scene. For the trees, I set the light to max power and ran around pointing the beam at different angles to the naked foliage. We also set a long shutter speed and did some light painting with the modeling light, mostly for the perennial scrub in front. In the end I got 90 images (a little much), 43 of which made it to the final composition.