New Studio Shots

I'm lucky to have some great friends to practice studio shots with. It's been really fun playing with the lights and backdrop to learn how to take studio portraits. Another interesting aspect of doing these studio shots is learning how to work with the models. Everyone has different levels of comfort when having photos taken of them, especially when revealing shots are involved. I put up some more of the shots in the portraits section of my portfolio website.

403rd!

I ran in the Bay to Breakers again this year and did pretty well. I was 403rd out of about 65,000 total runners and walkers with a time of 54 minutes, 10 seconds for the 7.46 mile course. That race is always really fun... with rock bands playing along the course and lots of people cheering. I was thinking of walking it to see all the goofiness that goes on with the folks who don't run it, but I'm too competitive with myself. I can't be in a race without running it.

My Apartment is a Photo Studio

A really cool friend and coworker has been letting me borrow his studio photography lighting. Using this kind of lighting is so much better than trying to use only ambient light or camera flash. The creative control afforded by these lights can make portraits look so much better. Of course, all of this is well-known by professional photographers. But hey, I'm still learning this stuff.

One thing I really like about portraiture is the challenge of bringing out the personality of the model. There are many photographers whom I admire that can do this really well, such as Annie Leibovitz in her many Rolling Stone portraits of celebrities. I really want to get to the point in my photography practice where I can bring out the personality of my subjects without fiddling around with the technical details of exposure, lighting, etc. I've been making a lot of progress recently, but I'm still developing my technique and abilities. I want to be able to have enough control to accurately reproduce different styles. I find that right now each photo session results in very different results from the previous one. While I of course want to have a variety of styles, but I also want to be able to control them.

Deep digital B&W photos

As you may know, I take photos. I like to create my own artistic interpretation of the world. But one thing I've been bummed about is how I haven't seen good black & white photos created from digital cameras. I love the contrast and detail of photos I used to take on TMAX 100 film before I went digital. So now that I have a fancy-pants digital camera and sessions scheduled to take portraits, I became determined this past weekend to figure how to make digital photos look damn good in black & white.

The problem is that digital black & white photos look too flat and lacking in contrast. It doesn't matter if you use the black & white setting on your digital camera, convert the photo to grayscale mode in Photoshop, or use the channel mixer in Photoshop. The result is just like making a black & white print from a color negative. But since digital photos are all just RGB pixel values, I knew there had to be a way to manipulate them to bring out the depth I wanted. More specifically, I want to be able to bring out really subtle skin tones.

So when I was playing with some borrowed studio lights by taking self-portraits, I messed around with the resulting image for a long time in Photoshop before finding the magic settings to get the look I wanted. When you take a color digital photo you have three channels (R,G,B) of image data. By using the channel mixer you can determine the proportion of data from each channel to use in the resulting monochromatic (black & white) image. While lots of tutorials have mentioned the use of this technique, none had shown how to use it to get the effect I wanted. However, by using extreme channel mixer settings and then adding a slight sepia tone to the image, I was able to do it!



The first image is the original color image taken by the camera. The second image is after applying a channel mixer layer with settings of: Red +118%, Green +50%, Blue +70%, Constant -60%, Monochrome. The third image has a tone added to though a hue/saturation layer with settings of: Hue 30, Saturation 10, Lightness 0, Colorize. While these settings produced great skin tone and detail, they also made the dark hair and clothing completely black. So, I actually had to adjust those items with less drastic channel mixer settings and them paste them back into the final image. The addition of the sepia tone brings out even more detail in the image. You can see more of the detail in a larger version of the final result.

Since I've learned a lot of photographic techniques from photographers who have openly shared their experience, I wanted to share my new technique as well.

A Recipe for Something New

Have you ever just wanted to make real change? Perhaps you're trying to get away from something in your life, or perhaps you're just tired of the same old routine and want to try something different.

I'm doing that.

In a month I'm going to leave work and my life in San Francisco to go live in Barcelona, Spain for three months. I've been working for the last six years in a tech job and I need a break. I need distance away from my normal life in order to change old habits and think objectively about everything.

How does one go about leaving his life?

I don't currently have any attachments or commitments which would prevent me from going. Part of this is by design since I've been wanting to make a trip like this for many years. I've always admired people who have been able to detach themselves from belongings, jobs, etc. and travel far away for longer than a normal vacation. My life has generally been very comfortable with trusted friends and belongings close by to keep me happy and safe. This trip is an exercise in detaching myself from things that I depend upon in my normal life.

Here's the plan. I am giving up the lease on my little studio apartment and selling all my furniture. My work is letting me take an unpaid leave of absence for three to six months. On June 3, I will fly out of LAX to Barcelona where there's a month of Spanish school and an apartment two blocks near the water waiting for me. I've only planned my trip through the end of June. During that time I will figure out what to do and where to live for July and August. I would like to find a random job at a cafe or something in order to practice Spanish and meet random people.

Who is this Mike you speak of?

Yes, you've found the site of Mike Goff. I've discovered that there are a number of us running around on the web. So, don't get me confused with this one, nor this other one. Just so you know who you're dealing with, I'm the one who grew up near San Diego and attended Torrey Pines High School. Then I wandered up to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend Berkeley, and eventually got a job at a computer company.