Let's Get Cooking - Dave Kai Piper

Written by Andy. Posted in Commercial Lighting Articles

Herbs house shoot-176-Edit So we had a casting call for the second season of the Unknown Photographer show that airs on BlackRapidTV.com as some of you might know. We asked people to submit from all over the world if they thought they should be featured on the show! I have to be honest, we got a ton and I mean a ton of submissions. I came upon a photographer named Dave Kai Piper based out of the United Kingdom. The show has plans to go to the UK but not for a while. I decided to start inviting some of the potentials onto unknownphotographer.net because I just couldn't wait until production, they have to be shared ASAP! So here you go, this is a result of my impatience!

Dave has blown me away with his photography. The fact that he's young, motivated and extremely talented was the complete package! We chatted a little bit and he decided to jump on board the project. He's a cool cat, with a lot to share. He treats his photoshoots like a recipe, so enjoy and...

Let's Get Cooking

So, as I was trying to look like I was doing some “work” I found the home of the Unknown Photographer the other day. An interesting and intriguing website I thought. A short investigation of the project and it had me hooked. When I noticed the little video asking for people to get in touch I did so without a moments hesitation. After all I am unknown and I am a Photographer.

dave chloe

So what had me firing of my to register my interest, and interest to what ? Well, let me introduce myself what I do.

I am Dave Kai Piper, 28 almost 29, and I take photos and coach other people who take photos too. Photographer and Photography Coach. I come from the UK and shoot with my own take on Fashion and contemporary Portraits. I love to make complicated things look simple and push simple things to the limits. I love to get people shooting and fire up the creative light we have within all of us.

Which, is why I love the concept of the Unknown Photographer, for me it's about the bigger picture (excuse the pun). I have a saying I like to use: “ Photography is not about photos, it's about people” and for me this project fully proves that point. It's about getting people together, it's about sharing the world, the paths we take in it and the things we have learnt. It's about real people doing real things, meaning, this is something that can really help.

It's not about super high end glossy photos taken on a super sexy Hasselblad with a world class creative team shooting for Prada, it's about you in your park taking photos of a duck. It's about being relevant to the wider photographic community. There is nothing wrong with high end photography, I am guilty of chasing my next cover for a magazine too, but there is more to this world and the Unknown Photographers aims hunt that down.

Fabulous! Fashion to Food, Medium Format to Mobile Phone, there will be something for everyone here and everyone can learn from it. This is a core value I agree with.

Raw To_PSD

As an educator, I know how important the delivery of information can be. It's vital to know how to engage with people and to understand how to communicate the messages, and even more so, to know what messages to communicate too. It's important to not give the right information at the wrong time and to not give the wrong information at the , well, to make sure all information is relevant. This is a core idea at Unknown Photographer. Being able to give real world practical advice for people at every level. For example, I would not jump into a telling a new photographer that I use a Quadtone /Duotone conversion method for my Black & White Conversions. I would tell them to to press the BW button and leave it there. Does a new photographer that is learning how to press the shutter button really need to be bogged down in PS for a year, do they just want to get out and shoot ? We can always come back to that later down the line. The main point is that it's very easy to over-complicate things. Sometimes the best people to learn from are the people around you/at the same level. The Unknown Photographer brings you this, and that is fantastic.

It's a community thing, its about seeing how other people deal with the same constraints as you. Seeing how people have tackled the same problems, seeing how people have innovated and avoided splashing huge amounts of cash. How good can you be with a cropped sensor and a speedlight ?

Do you really need all those lenses ? Do you really need to spend hours per photo in Photoshop ?

Photography is about vision and being visually aware and the only way to do this is to open up and see the word around you, being open to listen. Be ready to be inspired by everyone and everything. It's a big wide beautiful world that starts on your doorstep. If the Unknown Photographer helps demonstrate this, it has my backing 100%.

And then...

Just after Christmas I checked my e-mail an noted a very wonderful e-mail from Andy (Andy runs the website and the creative engine behind the project the Unknown Photographer. After a quick exchange of e-mails and a Skype call, we had a plan, and,I had found myself being nicely asked to provide some content for the site. Marvellous !!

So. . Here is a how did he do that guide to making a Dave Kai Piper portrait. Its super simple and I urge you to break out your camera and have a go. Send us the photos !!

The shoot which we are going to have a look at was shot in Munich just before Christmas 2011. I was one of my personal favourite shoots of the year. It was also where I shoot , one of two photos, that made it into the shortlist for Photographer of the Year 2011.

Here goes. Because it was shot in kitchen, we are going to pretend we are making a cake.

The Ingredients:

Mix it up !!

paddles Herbs house shoot-204-Edit The key with photography, as with cooking, is the ingredients and the prep time. Keep things simple and use the best quality produce. In my case , I had the amazingly talented Diana Zwarthoed as my Make Up artist and the very beautiful Chloe-Jasmine Whichello as my Model, or Modell as they say In Germany. We shoot this shoot in Munich in a Kitchen of all places in fact, so please excuse the cooking puns. This little shoot has an interesting background story. The short version is that I was challenged to shoot in someone apartment in Germany. As I am from the UK this meant a couple of things, I had to travel light and I was shooting in unknown environment. I needed to have some ideas and lighting set ups that would work in pretty much all conditions and spaces. I went for the single speed light approach, I love the SB900 for its power, but does have a heating issue at times, never the less, its what we had and used. We placed the Orbis Flash adapter on to spread the light out and give us that lovley Orbis glow. Eddie (www.3leggedthing.com) was perfect for this trip due to the super low weight of the tripod.

After Diana and I had picked out some make up styles and hair styles we liked I began to set up my lighting and Diana got to work on the make up. I was very lucky enough to have a lighting model aka Herb Nestler. I had another good look at my pre-made mood idea's sheet that I had made back in the UK and scouted around the room looking for a space that would suit. I found a wall next to a huge window that had net curtains, It was about noon and the sun was coming though in a wonderful way. I placed a chair about a meter from the back wall and about a meter from the window, which was now on the left side, parallel to where my model was going to sit. The Orbis was rigged up and mounted with a Frio coldshoe on to the tripod. I had Herb sit for me while I adjusted the lighting for my test shot. I set the camera to my usual starting settings. All the 2's f2.2 @ 200iso, 1/200th and adjusted the curtains and flash to get the right exposure.

import

I love shooting tethered to a computer. Here, I was shooting using a D700 into Lightroom 3. I had pre-designed some developing styles that gave me a high-res, quick preview of what I was shooting. This gives me a real good idea of how I am doing and lets me track the good shots and most importantly can give direct feedback to my model. The make up artist can watch the photos come in and make adjustments based on the colours of an edited photo. I love attention to detail, and shooting like this stops you from becoming trigger happy. It really makes you focus on the job at hand. Because my lighting was a mixture of strobe and ambient, being able to track really fine lighting changes was great too.

Diana Chloe2

After a short while Chloe-Jasmine was ready and we started shooting. The idea was to shoot a short set of photos in an editorial way. A mix of beauty and portrait. My take vintage. I wanted 8 photos in my set, so we aimed for 4 sets of 2 , changing the make up and bra every set. This made things a little harder as we now had a race against the sun to get all the shots done with the make up changes. This is where shooting tethered really helped as I could track progress and not over shoot. Because I had pre-made my developing preview I could be very confidant that I ‘had the shots’ as we went along.

Lightroom capture

These are some screen shoots of the photos as they looked coming into Lightroom.

So, we had our photos :) As you can see above, I was marking the photos as they came in. Red is something I like and then the stars mean they are worth a closer look. This is down as I was shooting. From this stage its all digital and a combination of Lightroom, Photoshop and Bridge. Many of you will know my affection for Bridge over Lightroom for the content management of photos and editing processes. I wont go into it so here much, but, I will say that Bridge is very powerful program and under used by a lot of people. In fact, if you do you use it in your core workflow, mail in and let us know.

Herbs house shoot-182-Edit-2 The actually shoot was fast and simple. I just kept in close with the 85mm and did all my cropping in camera. As you will notice in this edit guide, there is no cropping. I like to work with the Spot focus mode, ensuring it was on the eye every shot. I prefer to move the focus point in camera, rather and focus & recompose. I find this is far better for ensuring a good focus when at low DOP (depth of field).

I used the split toning and the vignette adjustments in the preset as shown below. I also used the graduated filters to enhance the vintage look. Some minor adjustment were also made with the lens correction presets.

Lets rewind a little bit. Cakes... or Cookies I think they are called in the US. Baking one tasty cookie is easy, you don’t really have to think how much of what you are putting in and you can make it up as you go. This is great, but its when it comes to making another, then another or making a whole batch, you need a plan to follow. You need a recipe. This is the same with Photoshop, as we go though photo by photo we make each one on its own and thus they all look a little different after. I wanted to show you a way to solve this and its just like making a recipe for a cake/cookie. We aim to take all 10 photos from my set and process them one by one but make them look like a body of work, edited to a style. We shall do it in a clean simple and quick way. We shall use pre-saved filters, Duotones and Layer masks.

I want to show you the what happened next in a little more detail. Once we have selected out 10 photographs, we take them into the Photoshop editing process. I NEVER start to edit before I have made ALL photo selections form a shoot. I also NEVER crop until the very last moment. Get the crop right in camera, golden rule.

Here Goes . . . .

colouring

LR vin

Step one

I imported the file into Photoshop as the Tiff file put out from Lightroom. It has a little vignette added and colour tweek. I do this in Lightroom as it is FAR easier to apply the same effect of all 10 photos.

STEP TWO AND STEP THREE

is to duplicate the background file. This is good working practice and something that the pros do. Get to work on cleaning up the clean up the skin. and keeping touching up though out the whole ten steps. Work slowly. I use a combination of the Spot heal tool, the Stamp / Clone tool, Patch Tool and the Spot healing tool. Find what works best for you. However, use a small brush and zoom in, you should be in a 100% or closer for doing skin work. Take your time and don’t rush. This step should be 60% of the editing time.

STEP FOUR

Next I used a plugin to get a nice glow on the skin. Portraiture from Imagenomics is great, but can murder a photograph when used badly. Use it softly and gently. I I have seen some lovely photos get wrecked at the use of this plug in. BE GENTLE and combine with a layer mask to only affect the areas needed. Avoid eyes, jaw lines, lips, hair, eyebrows. I have brought mine down to 42% opacity and left it in Normal Blending mode. I have uses a Channel Mask to let me via the areas on the Layer mask that I am affecting with the plug in. If you need tips on how the plug in works, mail me and if I get enough people asking, I shall do a How to use the plug in.

Step Five

Merge all visible layer and create a new layer. This is Ctrl+alt+E on the PC. If you only take away one thing from this... let it be this key cut.

Step Six

The Duotone filter. The Secret Ingredient. Duplicate the top layer in your layer stack into a NEW document, and convert into a funky colour. I have used my preset New Blue range of colours. This is a Quadtone, made up of Blue, Yellow, Gray and Cyan, which each colour having its own curves applied to create a unique tonal range. This can then be saved and applied to the new layer. Drag the new duotone layer onto the top of the main documents layer stack. I have then applied the Screen Blending mode and brought the Opacity to 25%. Simple ! The trick is finding a nice tonal range for your photo.

Step Seven

I have then added a Yellow Filter using the normal photoshop photo filters (new adjustment layer > photo filter). The interesting bit here is this, you can not save filters in Photoshop, but you can use the Hexadecimal numbers en-sure you get the same colour each time. I have used ffff00, which is yellow. I save the 6 digit code in the name of the layer on the layers panel. I also noted the density adjustments. This is be clear way in a moment. So - ffff00 D18% is the layer name

Google: Hexadecimal Colours - Tip . . .

Step Eight

H+0 L+0 S+9 the next adjustment layer has a complicated name but is very simple. It is nothing more than a Hue & Saturation layer. Each letter denotes an adjustment setting change. So here. The Saturation layer has been increased by 9 and everything else is left at 0

Step Nine.

Ctrl+alt+E to merge all layers and give a new layer while keeping the layer stack. This layer has the name Overlay 25%, which means I have applied the Overlay blending mode to the layer and reduced the Opacity to 25%

Step Ten

USM a55 r1.8 t0. This stands for UnSharp Mask. The following numbers are to denote the setting applied for each setting. I have then applied the mask using a Layer mask tool, which means using Ctrl+alt+E to create this layer first.

And done ! As you can see, there was nothing else to do on this photograph.

So.. when I move on to the next photo I have a recipe to tell me in what order and how much of what to add to the next photograph. Just taking the extra care during the shooting, photo selections and editing will make your life much easier when it comes to editing.

Now you are free to make as any cookies as you wish !!

You can then take this as a guide to editing the rest of the shoot and they will all look as slick as each other. I make sure you save at least one as a Jpeg so you have a guide. Keep this photo open as you edit the rest as you may need to correct using curves to colour match or adjust.

So to recap, How I made the Vintage, Kitchen Shoot.