Brandon McCormick directed The Candy Shop, a well-executed, beautiful allegory for child sex trafficking. It stars Doug Jones (Hellboy) as the villainous candymaker who lures little girls into his shop, transforms them into lollipops and sells them to adult men.
Also check out his brilliant earlier film Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man
Via Boing Boing
It’s just another Friday morning, clicking through my RSS feeds while nursing a slight hangover, when I came upon this vid.
Eye-popping brilliance. It may be a bit over the top and borderline bombastic, but it you can’t argue with the impact it makes especially on the initial viewing. I like the intensity of the animal expressions in slow motion, and the minimalist lighting and B&W look works for me. Only problem that bothers me is the “meteor” smoke trails that appear in the background, appear to be sharper and more in focus than the people that are in the foreground. Anyway, it doesn’t make it any less inspiring.
Taken in Los Angeles downtown arts district, where there’s a whole street of colorful graffiti/murals.
I asked the model Rodolfo, who is also a dancer and choreographer, to leap into the air with his arms outstretched. Took me several takes to catch him in midair, in a classic rapture/alien abduction kind of pose.
I wanted to see what his form would look like against the busy background of the graffiti wall. I think it’s only moderately successful. The right half of the wall has a lot of warm tones that blend too closely to the model’s skin. Lesson learned for the next time. Find complementary colors for a background!
We shot this at one of the buildings adjacent to Los Angeles Union Station. I wanted to get a classic, Mad Men style. William was seated at an armchair next to a full window, to get the soft sidelight on his face. If I had a bounce I would have used that to get a rim on his right side, but oh well. That glass table could have been placed further into the frame, IMO.
On my way south along the main road that cuts through Joshua Tree National Park, saw this field of cholla cacti growing in the middle of the desert. The shape reminds me somewhat of undersea coral. Or what I think coral might look like–I’ve never been under the sea. On the base of some were little round balls of cactus, reminiscent of spiky, devilish tribbles. Unfortunately my shots of the devil tribbles didn’t turn out so well.
Downloaded a nice piece of freeware called Deep Sky Stacker. It did all the rotating, aligning, and stacking of images to produce this final image, which I tweaked only a little bit in Photoshop.
Much improved over my previous sloppy hand-stitched effort.
Much easier too.
Took an opportunity while camping at Joshua Tree to try my hand at astrophotography. Started with taking a number of exposures with my aperture set to f/2.8 for 15 seconds each at ISO 800. Then carefully rotated and nudged each image in Photoshop to get the stars aligned.
This is the final result, using 10 images stacked and added together. I forgot to take a dark frame for noise subtraction. Maybe I can figure out a way to do that later.
While checking out the GLOW festival in Santa Monica another photog informed me that there would be a spacecraft launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base coming up in just under half an hour.
Cool, I thought maybe I could capture it arcing over the big ferris wheel on the Pier.
I dialed my camera to 30s at f/16, pointed it in the general direction of Vandenberg AFB (thanks to iPhone), and waited.
I almost missed it. There was this red thing moving through the sky. At first I thought it was a plane, but then I saw the discrete smoke trail.
Quickly I snapped the shutter, let it run for 30s, hoping the rocket would cross the entire field of view.
Nope. Crap. Press the shutter again.
The resulting image was a bit of a mess. The ferris wheel overexposed, the rocket trail only faintly visible.
I adjusted the two images in Lightroom. From the first RAW image I saved out two JPEGs, one with the ferris wheel properly exposed, another with the rocket trail accentuated. The second RAW image I saved out a copy with the rocket trail color-corrected.
Then in Photoshop I merged the three JPEGs into a single composite image using layer masks, to arrive at the final image.
It’s almost impossible not to take a good photo of Guerin, a new model I met at a recent shoot. She’s a classic beauty. It was a country-themed shot an she had a summer dress on. We shot at a new public space in LA that’s still a work-in-progress. Recently planted vegetation and saplings, not a lot of shade. I thought I could shoot her through some flowers with the sun overhead behind her. Worked out pretty well. Might have been nicer without the horizontal fence in the background.
Priscilla from our Manhattan Beach shoot came out to model for us again, though we got chased out of Griffith Park. Overzealous park rangers demanded that we show a shooting permit, so the shoot relocated to Pershing Square in downtown LA. Found a little corner of lush greenery in the mostly-concrete park. Shot in direct sunlight, stopped down to reveal detail in the brights, letting the darker areas fall into black.
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