BEHIND THE SCENES: Making of an "At the beach image"!

A day at the beach is the best place to capture beautiful summer images but sometimes it's just not possible. Here are several  images that were from a photo shoot I did last week. Hopefully it shows you that you can do some summer images indoors and not under the hot summer sun.

This is what it looked like in the studio.

The background was masked out and a beach image of sun and water (that was taken last year) was inserted into the background.
With a little tweaking in Photoshop for vibrancy and saturation this is the finished image. 

  Here's another finished image with basically the same setup from that shoot!

 They are a lot of fun to do and the possibilities are endless!!

 Hopefully I've given you some ideas to do your own SUMMER FUN IMAGES!! :)

These images is available for download at Shutterstock.com, Fotolia.com and Dreamstime.com

More links located on left side.

OPTIMIZING YOUR STUDIO SPACE!

When I moved two years ago I set my studio up very quickly but just recently have made some great improvements and I wanted to share them with you!
I read very often how many photographers wished they had a bigger space as a studio. I live in a condo and have designated one of my bedrooms as a studio. It's about 12 by 13 feet. It's not as large as I would like but it is quite efficient. I love that I can make a coffee in my kitchen then walk over to my studio in seconds, LOL!
One of the improvements was where to hide all my backdrops. Some of them are quite large and when your working with objects as your main photography focus it can be overwhelming to find space for everything!
One of the ideas I came up with was to hide all my wooden backdrops behind my drop down paper(black and white)roll backdrops that are suspended on a pulley system. Their hidden very well there and still very easy to get to when needed.

As you can see when the paper backdrops are down all is hidden. You would be surprised what you can hide behind there, LOL! Those pulley systems for the paper backdrops are terrific and very efficient also. I have one for three paper rolls. I have two for the moment but can't decide what my 3rd color will be yet.

I try to use a lot of natural light when shooting but when needed I have 2 Elinchrom D-Lite-it 4 2 Flash kit with softboxes. So far this is perfect for the size of my studio...maybe it could change but for now it's works great!

 

Another change I made very recently was to improve more space for props. I have been shooting on a large folding table for the last 5 years and realized that there was a lot of valuable space not being utilized  under the table so last weekend I purchased two large bureaus at IKEA.
Each bureau has 6 drawers and then were put back to back. We also decided to add wheels on each bureau so they would be moveable in the room. OMG, that gave me 12 drawers of extra space!!
My loving son (Christopher) bless his soul had the daunting task and the patience to assemble them last weekend for me! My brother Peter also lend a helping hand in the assembling and all went well. I now have so much more space.
One thing I could not do before was to put heavy objects on top of the table but now it's not a problem. That is not a child's chair that you see but a full size adult Adirondack sun chair so my table surface is quite large now.
One thing I've learned is when your studio space is not large it better be efficient. You also get much more positive productivity when you know where everything is!  Hope this helps anyone trying to organizing your studio!
Your ideas can flow much more clearly when there is less clutter in the studio as well as on the brain, LOL!