I hope all you viewers took a couple minutes to read Scott's last post, which included a few of the photos from Alice and I's wedding day, and got you up to speed for this post. Of course being photographers, visiting a tropical island for 10 days, we didn't...
Organized chaos was the theme of December. The business is going gangbusters (both on the personal and commercial side of photography), Alice and I just tied the knot in Hawaii and are quickly approaching our January local reception. Oh, you didn't think I was done, did you?...
Well, December 5th sure got here fast! Seemed like last June's proposal was only a couple weeks ago. The business has kept us so busy that the trip to Hawaii literally snuck up on us, resulting in a late night packing scramble, a 3-hour nights "sleep," and...
Before I get into the thick of this post, and the resulting photos, I need to get a little personal. This will probably be the most personal post on the Matty blog, ever. I try to keep the blog fairly focused with sights set on the...
A chat with Jessica Young on all things magical, complete with photos....
This is my grandma, Leona. It feels weird saying her actual name - she's always been "Grandma" in my world. But for the sake of this post I'll break protocol and let that one slide, but just once. I've been fortunate enough to grow up...
Is your entire family Seahawk crazy? Have a child who loves to pretend they are a Seahawk super star? You are exactly what we are looking for! Matty Photography is looking for both boys and girls between the ages of 3 and 7, to come participate...
Mid-late October was a foggy one around here in Tacoma. It was a thick fog that just never really went away for the better part of a week. Much like an overcast day, fog typically produces some pretty bland, grey photos without any lighting intervention....
I wanted to share a fun story from yesterday's impromptu photo adventure, and perhaps an inspirational/motivational one for you photographers out there. Most of our shoots here at Matty Photography are highly conceptual - we know the exact location and composition we are shooting, the...
[caption id="attachment_7623" align="aligncenter" width="556"] Hello, Clarice...
We've all heard of X-Men's 'Professor Xavier School For Gifted Youngsters,' but not many are familiar with 'Ardie's Day Care.' Ardie's is the elite academic program where the strongest, most gifted youngsters take their first steps into the world of heroism training. Located in the...
A string of photo assignments had me in the South end of Washington a couple weeks ago. It being quite a drive from my place in Tacoma, I decided to negate a lot of driving back and fourth by staying down in the area with...
Was on the road for a couple days doing shoots, one of them taking place at a bowling alley. A Great thing about a lot of bowling alleys is they hardly ever update the decor. In a world obsessed with constantly updating and getting new...
Often in my line of work, I don't get the opportunity to setup a lighting concept and do a dry run prior to the real deal. It's usually rolling into a shoot and setting it up mostly improv and by feel. This is mostly because...
I was walking by the meeting table today and just had to take a picture of its current situation. Yes, it's our "meeting table" but more often than not it's more of a staging platform for things going on at the studio. In other words,...
A few weeks ago I joined back up with the WWU project production team for another day of capturing film and photos. This time, however, our destination lay out in the far reaches of Neah Bay, WA. Being the very most NW tip of the...
A pixel is a pixel is a pixel... right? What is a pixel on my camera is a pixel on my computer which is a pixel of a digital or print file that I present to a photo client. True, there is no denying it, digital photographs are composed of pixels, lots of them, millions upon millions, each a single dot with a specific color representation, combining to make a final photograph. Since the birth of digital photography, photographers have been ever evolving to leverage post processing software to edit digital images. Every photographer uses these tools differently, some rely on them more than others, and I'd argue that some photographers are more graphic designers than photographers. But we are not going to get into those details today, a book could be written on those personal thoughts alone. Today I want to talk about something that has been eating at me for months, and it's bugged me so much that I felt that I finally needed to share it with you. I'm sure this post will upset some who are just as upset as I am about the topic I'm about to discuss. That's good! The people who are losing out are the ones who don't feel or say anything at all. This is my blog, it's been home to my personal and professional visual works, adventures, advice, and personal photographic thoughts for years. There are almost 300 blog posts. I try to be as real as I can with genuine thought. This blog isn't a marketing gimmick, it serves many purposes, ranging from visual entertainment to educational. I try not to speak out of line, and if I'm providing advice to my readership I do my best to ensure that information has integrity behind it. The one thing you will not experience reading here on my blog are lies and me feeding you, my clients and fellow photographers, a bunch of shit. I'm a photographer, I'm paid to take photographs of people. I've photographed just about every age a person could be and in a dizzying array of situations. I do edit my photos in a post processing application. I'm asked to do very normal things to photographs in post, and I'm asked by some clients to do some very disturbing things in editing their images. However, contrary to many photographers out there, my job is 95% done after I've taken the picture. I've put in the time and effort required to make the photograph great at time of capture, so my editing load is minimal. For other photographers, taking the picture is only 25% of the completion. They spend countless hours in post. But this isn't the "shit" that I'm talking about, the subject that has my feathers a bit ruffled.
A quick little post on some photos I took during the winter storm we had here in the PNW a couple weeks ago. With significant snow fall (for this area anyway) for a number of days, coupled with temps that yo-yo'd above and below freezing,...
A question I posed to Facebook users back in October - How many lights were used in the photograph above? Extra bonus points for taking a stab at light modifiers used on said number of lights. I created this photo strictly as a visual aid for an article I wrote back in October as well (click here for that post). Taking the little side project further, I was curious to see if anyone following me on Facebook would get close to the light setup used to make the photo. I would have to say Justin was the closest guess, as he went into some pretty good detail on lighting position. Reproduction of the "real" world is a funny thing in the photo and video field. I guess we have commercial photography and the movie industry to thank for our completely unrealistic view on reality nowadays. What I mean by that, is that artificially lighting most setups as if it were 100% replicating a natural occurrence flat-out looks bad in a final photograph. Walking around in real life, we see things, accept them as beautiful, and we appreciate them and go on with life. However... when it comes to looking at a photograph that was done well, in respect to holding true to artificially re-creating only natural forms of light found in the world, we get REALLY picky. "Oh, I don't like how that person's head isn't edged-out by backlighting and cannot be made-out from the background, " or "the shadows are not filled-in enough for me." We don't know what "natural" even looks like anymore. It's true, and a comment on the Facebook photo proves it, with a user guessing that only light from the computer screen is lighting this entire photo (not their fault, this is the general public's view of light and what they are exposed to with every photo and video professional produced). And with today's overstimulating, commercialized, uber marketing online world, we demand to see the "real world" in a not-so-real situation with perfect beauty lighting on faces, proper rim lighting, and fans blowing a models hair back... now that's REAL life (I kid)! Every once in a while, we photographers can get away with a "natural" lighting approach, and get away with a people pleasing photo, but not often. We usually have to cleverly light it to ensure all of the visuals in a composition are well-lit for proper attention and detail.
