Focus208 – Coeur d’Alene from Scott Sturges on Vimeo.

In an ongoing attempt to photograph the state of Idaho, otherwise known as Focus208, I have taken some photos around downtown Coeur d’Alene, Id.

I chose to photograph the two blocks between Sherman and Front Avenue, and 4th and 6th street. I wanted to show some of the “urban-decay” (as in the alley ways and rundown walls) as well as the new urbanization (such as the new towers) of downtown.

The photos were processed from Camera RAW in Photoshop CS4, where light adjustments were made, and sharpening was applied. Unfortunately, I over-sharpened some of my images, but for the most part they all look pretty decent. They were then processed through my fancy Focus208 Photoshop action, which essentially resizes them, adds a border, adds my name, and saves it as a jpg.

After editing the photos, I made them into a slideshow (above) and added the music, Analog Plan by Thomas Schneider, found on Freeplaymusic.com. The slideshow was compiled in Picasa 3 for Mac from Google in 720p resolution (because 1080p takes too long to upload). I actually liked using the program a lot despite it being slightly glitchy software.

This project took me an insane amount of time for some reason, it seemed that I was overthinking some of the process, as it took me several days to edit the photos. Just prepping the video and making this post took over 4 hours.

There was some inspiration from Digital Photography School, Urban Landscape Photography Tips.

Below are the contact sheets of the photos taken on the assignment.

Center of map

map

map

map

balloonlelss markjer

Lastly, there was an extremely blurry shot of Josh Stevens that I took while shooting this project that Twitchell (linked due to request) liked, so I’ll post it for your viewing…

Last week, my photography class traveled to Boise to compete in a photography competition through SkillsUSA Idaho in Boise, Idaho. Our class competed in two different competitions, Photography, and Promotional Bulletin Board. Later, I’ll post the whole bulletin board project as I am finally done with it and I presented it successfully (1st place FTW).

Anyway, for the photography competition, we were bussed to Columbia High School in Nampa, Idaho to begin the competition. After we picked up some more students, we all went to Downtown Nampa for the shooting portion. We were assigned to shoot the Urban Decay of Nampa.

Below are the shots I chose and edited for the competition.

I ended up using the alley way shot a book cover project for the book Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Unfortunately, I do not have the originals for all of them, just the ones I edited, because the judges kind of stole our cards. So below I posted a contact sheet with the originals. Finally, the inspiration of this post was completely the judge, as he set the requirement for it to be urban decay, so I can’t really post an inspiration link this week.

– Scott

As we approach Spring Break, and SkillsUSA for Idaho State, I have been working on my speech for the Promotional Bulletin Board, redoing a few minor things on my board, choosing 11×14′s for the photo competition, and creating my portfolio.

I also have been working on a few projects that I will hopefully get posted during Spring Break, or soon afterward.

Story

Last September, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. As a result, throughout the past 6 months, our family has gone through many changes. One of them being my mom losing her hair due to chemotherapy. However, she has not let it affect her, and has developed many different ways of covering her head. When her Chemo ended, we decided to get photos of all of the styles of hats and scarves she wore on a daily basis. I set up my studio, and shot some pictures of each scarf and hat she has worn. I also got a shot of her simply without hair.

Shooting

I wanted to add a more dramatic look to the photos, so I felt that black and white suited the photos the best. I setup a white sheet, with a strobe behind it, then set up two more strobes, diffused by umbrellas, at 45° angles from the subject. I then used my Canon 50mm f/1.8 to get some nice torso shots of her.

Editing

The editing process was fairly simple, but took some time. First, I selected the photos that would look good in the poster — I tried to not get duplicate styles (read: hats) — and put those in a separate file. After that, I opened them up in Adobe Camera RAW, and processed them. This part was rather easy, as they were all shot at the same exposure because of the controlled light setup in which they were shot.

After processing them in ACR, I did some minor cleanups on the skin, changed all to grayscale, and sharpened them. Finally, I arranged then in a large canvas in photoshop so that it would look good when printed as a poster.

In all, I spend around 12.5 hours on this project, with around 2 ¹/₂ hours shooting, and 10 hours editing and processing.

The past week, Stephen and I continued to work on the Promotional Bulletin Board for the Lewiston, Idaho SkillsUSA competitions.

Recent changes/additions include finalizing the backdrop, working on the foreground, and getting ready to print. We are also starting to think about the speech and q/a.

Once we’re done, I will post the final copy, and possibly all of the steps involved.

–Scott