Parker A Grimes Photography

A Shift In Thinking

As I have been editing my photos from our local Help-Portrait event, I can’t help but ponder about what a cool experience it was. I first heard about the Help-Portrait movement from Jeremy Cowart’s guest blog on Photoshop Insider. I thought at first that it sounded like a pretty good idea and began to follow @help_portrait on Twitter to just keep an eye on how it developed. I didn’t necessarily have any intentions to be a part of it. Then the brains behind HP launched a video and a blog post that blew me away. Seeing those really struck a chord with me. “That is some powerful stuff” I thought. I wanted to be a part of that. If you’re not familiar with Help-Portrait yet, spend some time at http://help-portrait.com.

With that, our Cedar City Utah Help-Portrait event was born with the help of 3 other local photographers. The experience has been amazing on several levels. First of all, what other profession/hobby has banded together on a global scale to just help people before? I don’t know of any. Second, the way we have helped people is completely different. It isn’t monetary, or physical help we were rendering. We were’t helping build schools, or feed the hungry. Rather, it was much deeper than that. It was us saying, “hey, you know what? I care about you. I want you to feel good about yourself. I want you to know that you are special.” We took people’s portrait and we will deliver a print, that is it. It is incredible that something so simple could have such a big impact on someone.

I’ve worn many hats when it comes to professions. I’ve always maintained a straight career path, but I’ve also branched off to do other things along the way. When I wear the “photographer’s” hat, so to speak, something fundamentally changes in the way I think about other people. My tendency is to think that people are idiots sometimes, however, as a photographer, I look at someone and think about how they would look in a photograph. I even imagine what type of setting and lighting would make them look best. This completely transforms my  thinking and my attitude toward other people. The most gratifying thing about photography is having someone look at a photo I’ve taken of them and love the way they look. Basically it is helping that person realize that they are special. Something we easily forget. It is easy to get down on yourself and feel like nobody cares or thinks you are important.

The other amazing thing about Help-Portrait is that it brought a group of photographers together which has now become a friendship. Our group had never all met together until Help-Portrait. We have interacted online, but never in person. We all had an instant connection- photography. Now it looks like we will be getting together just to collaborate and share ideas and information. I can’t wait!

Our Event

There were four photographers involved in our event. Terrel Fox, John Lisonbee, Jen Ova, and myself.  We held our event at Kolob Regional Care & Rehabilitation, a long term healthcare center in Cedar City. Dani Katwyk, at Kolob Regional, did an amazing job scheduling and organizing things. She arranged for all of the people we would photograph to arrive at scheduled times. The spacing between each photoshoot was perfect. We setup two backdrops and had two portrait sessions scheduled at a time. The four of us photographers took turns taking photos.

Dirk Evans from Evans Hairstyling College arranged to have two stylists there to do hair and makeup. The ladies at Kolob were thrilled to have that done. It was so fun to see them looking their best. The girls that did the hair and makeup were great.

We ended up taking photos of 40+ people. For me, I could have taken just one portrait and it would have totally been worth it. The reaction we got from some of the people was absolutely priceless. The whole Help-Portrait movement is about giving photographs. The point was to give the people their photo, not to share them and say look how great I am. Still, I would love to show you some of their photos. Not to show you how great I did, but we all took some great photographs of some really awesome people and I would like you to see how awesome those people are too. However, for privacy reasons, we have been asked not to share the photos publicly. That request isn’t specific to our event, but a global request by the whole Help-Portrait organization.

Next year I will absolutely do this all again. I may even find more opportunities like this throughout the coming year. We’ll see. One thing for sure, I made some great friends. So I wanted to give a huge thank you to Terrel Fox, Jen Ova, and John Lisonbee. Also a huge thanks to Dani at Kolob Regional and the gals from Evans Hairstyling College.

My photoshoots usually include a disc with 10 retouched images on it. I am excited to now be offering those retouched photos on a custom printed DVD. I select one of the images from the session and have it professionally printed right on the DVD. This is not a printed label that sticks to the disc. The image is printed right on the disc, and they look fantastic. I am happy to be offering this to my clients and I hope that it reflects the care and extra effort I put into my work.

I got the first set of custom printed DVDs back today from the professional print lab, MpixPro, that I use for all my prints. I am very pleased with the quality. They exceeded my expectations.

These pictures don’t really do them justice. They look amazing in person, but here is what they look like.

I am a big proponent of getting the shot right in the camera to avoid having to fix something in Photoshop after the fact. I recently had a really good example of why this is important.

I designed a wedding invitation for a bride recently. Her wedding theme heavily involves peacock feathers. Instead of a flower bouquet, she will have a fan of peacock feathers. On the invitations, she wanted to have peacock feathers. I didn’t have any peacock feathers, so I went to iStockphoto.com and found a whole bunch of peacock feather images to choose from and potentially buy. The bride initially sent me an example of what she wanted that had peacock feathers on a white background. iStock had lots of feathers on white backgrounds to choose from, excellent. I chose one, and made a rough draft design for the bride. She liked it, but really wanted the background to be black with white text instead of a white background with black text. I thought, no problem, it should be easy to replace that white background with black.

Have you looked really closely at a peacock feather before? The little tiny hairs on the barbs of a peacock feather are very intricate. I quickly discovered that changing a white background to black would be a nightmare. There might be some Photoshop guru out there that could do it, but for me it was an impossible task. So on to plan B. I could buy a stock peacock feather image shot on a black background. The problem with that is mixing a photo with a black background and a solid black Photoshop layer poses serious problems come printing time. The two blacks may look the same on your monitor, but when they are printed, they are different shades of black. So, my only option was to make a photo of the peacock feathers myself. Had I done this in the first place, I would have saved myself a lot of time and headache.

I found someone that had connections with a peacock farm and acquired a really nice feather. I just needed to make one picture with the peacock feather in two places in the photo leaving room for the wedding invitation text, all with a black background of course. It took 5 minutes to make the photo. I used the multiple exposure function in my camera to take two shots with the feather in different positions, resulting in one photo all done in camera, no Photoshop. Here is the setup shot (click to view it larger).

The combination of using a 1/25o sec shutter speed and controlling the light with a spot grid resulted in a solid black background in camera.

And here is the final shot right out of the camera. All the empty space was done intentionally so that I could just drop the invitation text onto the photo.

So the morale of the story is that I spent probably a couple of hours attempting to Photoshop a feather from a white background to a black background before I gave up. Getting a feather and doing it all in camera really was the best approach. It literally took about 5 minutes to make the image and I didn’t have to do anything with it in Photoshop.