Creatique Photography Studio, Maciej Blaszczuk

Recently, I have started to make more and more composites from my images. Actually, I prefer to work with composites, rather than with on location scenery, why? The answer is simple, with composites, I can let my imagination go unlimited. I can place my subject anywhere I want, whether its space, top of the hill or middle of the ocean.
I have recently posted this image below. It is HDR-ed heavily and my model is extracted from another image and placed into a scenery that I took in my recent trip to NYC.
Does it work? Well, maybe not quiet, but as it is one of my first full composites, I believe that it will improve overtime and will start to sell the illusion properly.

Below image with Anna, there is one we took with JB. I believe that it is significantly better and you can clearly see that ilusion here is much more believable.

However, posting composites, created some negative voices, saying, that it is cheating, or even brought complete rejection of my work. On one hand it is good, as I can clearly see that there are some emotions going on among viewers, but also this can make them turn away from my work. Well, lets see. Compostiting and HDR in the area of portraiture, strong, gritty, hard lit images of musicians, interesting faces, movie-like scenes and sports are going to be my focus for the time being.

This is the way I was searching for for past year, trying different styles and approaches… for now, I think I found my way… for how long, we’ll see…

Stay tuned for more work…

Cheers,
Maciej

Dosłownie wczoraj, postanowiłem iż rozpocznę mini projekt portretowy, który będzie koncentrował sie na ludzkich emocjach, a konkretnie na jednej– FOCH!
To przeciez takie ludzkie i takie codzienne. Strzelamy fochy praktycznie na każdym kroku, powiem więcej, my jako Polacy jesteśmy wręcz specjalistami w tej dziedzinie. Tak więc od wczoraj, działam na rzecz w/w projektu.

A jelikoż, wpadł do mnie wczoraj JB, stał sie pierwszym modelem w tym przedsięwzięciu. Poniżej premierowe zdjęcie w projekcie FOCH. Bawcie się dobrze i pozdrawiam wszystkich.

Maciej

Studio Creatique, 2011 (C)

Studio Creatique, 2011 (C)

This post is a re-print from my blog page on 500px. http://500px.com/MaciejBlaszczuk/blog

Couple of weeks ago, we did a shoot with NIkola.She is a great model, very beautiful with incredible smile – although as you will see on the shots she did not smile much However, most valuable insight in to this session was creativity of my model. I do not precisely remember, how we did get in touch, but as soon as we exchanged few e-mails, I knew she has one million ideas and guess what, its all planned, sorted and ready to go! I got the list of possible styles that she is ready to shoot. I picked 2 – lady in red and rocking girl.It is great to work with models like this, as I myslef like to brainstorm a lot about the session, ideas, colors, poses, basically everything. I like to feel passion for what we are about to create photographically. Nikola is this kind of personality, easy going, smiling, although you could think initially, that she is shy. She works her way out on the set.

Normally, I always talk to a model and we discuss, what kind of coaching she needs from me, and what she does not like. Its the worst nightmare if you do not know this up front and you stress or annoy your talent, before you get up to speed. You have to be sensitive and you need to know how to coach, or not, to get things moving smoothly. You also need to remember, that model does not see what you see through the lens, It took over a month before we settled a date and finally we met and shoot. Have a look at Nikola’s blog for more images from different sessions: http://nicollee-bochynska.blogspot.com/
MUA for the shoot was Marta Joanna Siedlecka or as I call her ‘Martucha’ (She probably hates it, but never told me) She did a great job as always. BTW, I will elaborate on working with MUA’s and pros and cons of this kind of cooperation based on my experience soon. Should be fun, and maybe a start to an end of some ongoing cooperations(hope not) For this shoot, for the first styling (red), I used one light, which was 60x90cm softbox on a studio strobe in horizontal position. As a fill light, I had my deep octa 120cm behind me on minimal power not to loose details in the fabric and accesories Nikola was wearing. We shot against white wall. For second styling (Black), we used grey background with deep octa as a main light, slightly from the side for full body shots and from the side for portraits, to obtain totaly black background. I used grey bckgrd, as I knew when shooting, that for those images i will do some compositing. And for this, grey is the best to work with. As a rim/fill light, I used bare reflector from the back, on the opposite of octa, to get some light in to the hair and separate my model from the baackground. Details on the settings, you can check on the photo-page here at: www.500px.com/MaciejBlaszczuk
Hope you enjoy the images. Please comment, like or hate and let me know why? Below also a face chart from MUA and a backstage. More coming soon! Maciej

Studio Creatique, Warsaw, Poland

Studio Creatique, Warsaw, Poland