I had the honor/privilege of being interviewed by Scott Shepard for Nik Radio from Nik Software this week!  Hopefully I didn’t ramble too much, and you can learn a bit about how I approach art in general.  After the podcast airs I’d love to do a follow up post and explain more of my thought process and creative approach.  It’s something I learn more about every time I shoot and I love sharing my thoughts.  You can catch the free podcast on iTunes here:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/nik-radio/id365360524

Also, for anyone new to my sites or my work, I’d be honored if you’d hit me up on my Facebook photography page!  With FB recent update to high res images, I recently uploaded a full high res gallery of my work for you to enjoy!  Please “Like” my page so you can follow all my latest updates!

 
https://www.facebook.com/israeldavidgrovemanphotography

I had a real blast meeting and photographing actress Jessica Cameron in downtown Hollywood the last time I was in LA.  Jessica is a very dedicated and hardworking person, and her resume shows she’s going places!   We had a great time shooting at a very unique house of a good friend of hers.  Some of these images have truly become some of my favorite.  Crazy, crazy, and more crazy!  I think the guitar exploding composite is one of the busiest, most colorful, and “loudest” pictures I’ve ever taken, but I dearly love it for that.

Keep an eye out for Jessica, and if you want to see something that she did recently, look for her in the SyFy Channel movie “Camel Spiders!!”

I had the privilege of shooting actor, writer, producer and director Peter Dobson and actor Bob Spillman from Peter Dobson’s recent short White Mule when I was last in LA.  I was actually able to attend the premiere of the film at the Regent’s Showcase Theater the same week I was there, and I thoroughly enjoyed the film and everything that went into it!

The goal of this shoot was to capture a bit of the ethos of White Mule and the golden era of the auto, from 1950-1975.

You can see the trailer for White Mule at the end of the post!

Sebastian Siegel is an actor, writer, artist, and filmmaker.  Some of you may recognize him from the shows LOST, HAWAII Five-0 and most recently THE FINDER.  Read more about Sebastian at  http://www.sebastiansiegel.com/Site/Bio.html

Sebastian and I had the privilege to meet and discuss shooting a couple years ago.   With my recent trip to LA we were finally able to make it happen, even though both our schedules were filled to the brim!  We woke up well before dawn and shot on Highway 1 in Malibu on the Pacific Coast.

Please enjoy this Road Warrior / Steve McQueen style shoot, Sebastian was a big part of helping to plan and finalize the look you see here, and his input was invaluable. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did working on it.

This January I got to work with the amazing Vivica Hallow from Charlotte, North Carolina!  Vivica is a very cool model who does a lot of different types of modeling, and I always like to mention that she recently had a part in the big-budget Hunger Games film.  Our session went really well and there were so many great images from our work together, it is truly a shoot I can return to in the future. Thanks to Graffiti Warehouse and Ren Garczynski for the studio space!

I was shooting an event, and had noticed a 6 foot 4 or so gentleman with a very striking / dramatic look.  I struck up a conversation and asked if I could shoot a quick portrait – turned out that my target was an actor from Rome, Italy.  We  stepped into the hallway, and after a brief discussion of our mutual love for the films of Sergio Leone,  I only had about 2 minutes and 30 seconds to work before I had to get back to the event… I used two speedlights, one high left, and one to the right for a bit of side fill.  I took a bunch of shots – nothing super complicated, but this one is my favorite.

Practice not only looking for portrait subjects, but making portraits happen, and with very little time.  It will make the big shoots that you have a bit more time for seem like you have all the time in the world.

As some of my close friends know, I have a quite large collection of various highly detailed statues, figurines, toys, and action figures.  I’ve been collecting this stuff off and on for a while… it staved off quite a bit over the last decade and I’ve donated quite a number to my own kids, but I still obtain new “specimens” every once in a while.  Personally I find it incredibly fascinating because of the amount of variety and detail in today’s figurines.  People have told me they could spend hours just looking at my displays, all of which are carefully placed and posed by theme and setting.

As everyone knows, there is an increasing amount of photographic activity on networks like instaGram, Twitter and Facebook.  While my body of professional work is still just as much a part of what I do with my cameras, I spent some time thinking about what and how I wanted to use instaGram. I use it to capture moments quickly, occasionally to display bits from my professional work, and overall to display the glory of this awesome little tool we all love called the iPhone.  I too made fun of and mocked the trends that were becoming so overly prominent with instaGram – it was like over night, millions of people were posting the same shots with the same filters.  Then I got my own iPhone, and I am so grateful for what this amazing tool adds to my overall photographic experience.

The 4s was actually my first iPhone even though I was very familiar with the platform and a lot of the tools.   When shooting iPhone photography I see two main choices, even though there really are hundreds more really awesome apps that do amazing things with photos, and there are a number of ways to permutate your editing choices on the iPhone:

• Shoot it with the native iPhone camera, or at least an app that uses such, which has a more traditional panoramic ratio for composition – edit with Snapseed, share directly on Twitter or Facebook and/or import to Instagram
• Shoot straight from instaGram, which is limited to a square ratio for composition, and has a nice set of editing tools but not nearly as powerful as Snapseed

While I personally grind my teeth a bit at the fact that InstaGram limits you to a square ratio – there is something here that I like, that carries over to how I view all my iPhone photography these days.  InstaGram has been somewhat accurately compared to Auto-Tune for photography, stating that it makes it too easy for people to make semi-pro looking photos, with little effort on the part of the photographer.  While this is absolutely true to some degree, because instaGram auto sharpens and gives you only two real choices in terms of how you finalize a shot (filter + blur or filter + (no blur)) I find it interesting to try and evoke some of the same feeling I get in my other photos with such strict limitations.  I hope that InstaGram eventually provides more choices, and I’d love to see the Nik Software guys write a sharing app that lets you use the power of Snapseed directly before you share.

Ultimately, along with everything else I normally do, I’ll be posing my wide variety of figurines in various environments and posting on InstaGram along with the “normal” stuff everyone does on the network, but usually just once a week to get some quick practice in.

I personally also additionally see this as an excellent form of photography practice.  It is difficult to make an inanimate subject look interesting – it will require a pretty stiff imagination when it comes to composition – not only that, but I will be using video lights instead of strobes, thus it is an absolutely perfect setting to practice lighting and lighting ratios. It is also a great exercise to try and find quick, creative locations with little time, while being restricted to very little editing choices in post.  In addition, it allows me the chance to mimic a slight studio setup in miniature on a repeated basis.

I hope you enjoy this series, and feel free to follow me on InstaGram at “idgroveman” and on Facebook here!

Here are a few of my favorite highlights from my portrait shoot with Kat Carlson.

I am incredibly excited about this new charity I will be doing some work for as my time permits.  When I created my Google+ account earlier this summer, it was initially just an experiment – I had no idea some of the people I would meet nor what would come of some of my interactions.

Through Google+ I met the wonderful Krista Kennell who is a press photographer out in LA.  She instantly began sharing her passion for this charity she is a representative for, titled “Hearts Apart.”  

This charity is a non-profit organization that provides free photos and photoshoots for military families that are in the process of deployment.  Select photographers from around the nation are approved for work, and then lined up with military families in the pre-deployment stage in their local region.  The organization is very well organized, and they have specific standards for the quality they look for in those who do work for them, as well as representatives who link families with photographers and help with the process of scheduling and connecting.

Ultimately, the process is very simple – to provide a means to capture intimate moments with a family before they go through the stress and intensity of being separated through deployment.  Each session involves a series of family photos, as well as some creative and artistic interpretation of the soldier in both dress and combat-ready uniforms.

Both the family as well as the soldier pick one photo that is printed in high quality pocket size, and laminated to withstand the rigors of deployment and ultimately, combat.  To deliver such precious cargo to our soldiers who are on the battlefield is an honor, and the thought that my own work could serve to be a soldier’s link to all that is dear in the best and worst moments of war is something I approach with deep respect, honor, and dedication.  It is nothing less than a great honor.

As you can see on the main site, there are some wonderful photographers working for this charity and I was flattered to be asked to help out.  Check them out and if you think you are qualified and want to help out, by all means send them a note!

I have my first Hearts Apart session scheduled sometime in the next couple months, so keep an eye out for anything I might be able to share!

Once again, here is their main page, and here is their Facebook page!

For those of you who don’t already know, “Ghillie” is the term for the suit my subject is wearing that looks like grass… the name is inherited  from Scottish warriors who were from the Ghilly clan and were the first to use these methods on the battlefield.  It has become standard practice in militaries worldwide to use this sort of camouflage.

As a photographer, this presents a unique challenge – how do you shoot what is invisible, or what you aren’t supposed to see?  In order to gratify my photographic requirements, I had the sniper ease up on some of the camo so there was enough visibility to provide interesting photos.  Truly, with no studio lighting, and all pieces in place, he is 100% invisible.

There were two days of shooting.  Ultimately, I was taking this setup in spots where people weren’t expecting it, so I had to be discreet.   Both days were harangued by major weather problems.  The first day, I shot in a total torrential downpour – it started raining around Monday at 12 pm right about when we were shooting, and actually didn’t really stop till Friday of the same week (those in the DC area will recall the flood warnings).  I had some additional shots planned, as well as some additional shots taken, but I had to cut everything short due to the immense downpour, and even some of the shots I got were waterlogged.  I took my son Quinn with me on the rain shoot (as you can see in the video below), and it was great to have him there.

The second day, we left around 2 am for the Shenandoah Valley with no real plan in place… mostly because I didn’t have the resources or time to make it happen any differently.  My goal was to find an Eastward facing overlook for a sunrise shot.  Thankfully my subject had $9,000 night vision goggles, which we used to explore in the complete blackness of old Virginia before the sun rose.  It truly is a spectacular and breathtaking experience to be in darkness so thick you can’t see the hand on your face, then to peer through this device and see the world open up before you.  The video I created has a bit of this in it – the video resolution is nowhere near the actual clarity of the NVGs, though, in actual use, they are about 40 times sharper.  Check out the ambient moonlight hitting the peaks of the mountains that isn’t even visible to the naked eye – you can see a few stars, but through the goggles themselves, you could see thousands of them.

By the time the sun came up, almost the entire valley and all overlooks were completely swallowed in white fog and clouds that cut visibility down to about 6 feet. Thankfully, one of the same overlooks we scouted the night before was still visible, but it faced West, and it was right next to the road.  We Ghillied up, shot about 30 natural light frames as quick as possible, and jumped back in the car before anyone saw us.

I still have quite a bit I’d like to shoot with this setup, and maybe next time we won’t have any weather problems.  Improvisation is the name of the game!

I used a bit darker of a look than I usually target, but I felt it fit the subject matter.  Most of the look you see was generated by Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 3′s “Midnight Green” filter with lots of layering and masking and some layers duplicated with either the luminosity or the Pin Light setting.