Sometimes I amuse myself how I take my bed shoots to a whole new level. The white bed seems to be my favorite canvas. When a model can just play on the bed, my mind starts to play with ideas. Here is a little more in depth look at the process. This method of composite is exactly how movie special effects are done. Think “300″ the movie where everything was shot on a green screen. Even evening scenes are taken at normal lighting and later adjusted digitally. The advantage of shooting in normal lighting is being able to focus and being able to control with accuracy the lighting in post processing.

Naughty poses are fun. Bad kitty, bad!

Royalty free stock images can be found online. Here I create a mask for the model.

Another stock image of a tree trunk with same mask copied.

Foliage image resampled many times for layered effect. Add depth by adding blur to different layers.

Foreground layer blurred even more.

All the layers combined with desaturation and curves applied. Notice I also blurred the background for greater focus on the mode, as well as added a highlight to her right side.

Three layers here. One layer with dust speckles. One layer with lens flare. One layer with a few areas of white with zoom motion blur applied about 20 times.

The final image with more lighting and color adjustments, added a soft texture to the whole image, and added scratches to the bark.

Download the long version of the Bad Kitty Photoshop video here! Make sure you use Quicktime player to watch, as you can use the left and right arrow keys to scan frame by frame to better understand the video. It’s at 130% original speed at 15 fps.

Just in time for the costume holiday. Here’s a 49 minute edit compressed to 9 minutes. The trick to a fast edit is memorizing pretty much all of the shortcuts in an application. The 1.5 seconds it takes to move the mouse to and back from a toolbar, times a few hundred throughout an editing session can mean saving lots of minutes.

This past Sunday was the most ideal weather and time of year to be taking car photos, so I organized a shoot with some friends and e46fanatics.com forum guys and girls. In fact, it was the best time of the year to take photos of absolutely anything outdoors. Without professional rigging or planning, I just had people show up and I’d wing the shoot just like I do for every other shoot of mine.

My camera rig was a Canon 5D, Canon 24-70mm 2.8L with 8x ND filter on a ball-head mount with a metal pole and clamp and wired remote, handheld outside the car at 45-50mph. We drove on Palisades Parkway which is probably one of the smoothest and cleanest highways so I wasn’t worried about rocks chipping my equipment. Shutter speeds of about 1/60 to 1/90 would be enough to create the blur. This was a first for me, and hopefully I can experiment more with cars in the future.

The other day I was shooting a reception at a Chinese restaurant, where my seat was at the white folks table. Every Chinese wedding is obligated to have one of these tables, usually the coworkers of the bride or groom. Needless to say, these people were freaked out by most of the dishes that came out, sometimes they are daring, and some just refuse to touch it. If I were a guest, I would love to sit at this table because that means nobody is fighting for food and there would be plenty for me.

However this time, I was not the guest and I placed my name card on my dish in front of these folks so they would know this was my seat. I don’t know if these folks were just absolutely mindless, inconsiderate, or blatantly have no respect for photographers, but I thought the worst thing they could have done was to finish all the food and not leave any for me. Oh, I was wrong. They managed to kick it up a few notches.

After about 50 family portraits on the stage, I walked back to my seat but there was not just one seat, but two! Two seats stacked on top of each other as if nobody was supposed to sit there, while my name card was still on my dish. I got rid of the stacked seat and sat down to eat a dish with octopus, seaweed, jellyfish, while listening to these folks joke about the food they dare not eat, with the soda bottles and unwanted glasses all jammed around my space. When the dude next to me receives another bottle of Heineken, he pushes his empty bottle towards me. It doesn’t end there, as if the act me of sitting down and eating still does not click in their minds that this is my seat. I come back after many more courses have already eluded my chopsticks, to find the obnoxious dude embracing my seat with his arm like a lover for his comfort, or more like raped the seat, as one of my chopsticks somehow end up 3 feet from my chair and there was garbage and a white hand towel thrown over my plate. That incident pretty much ended my dinner for the night, and I continued the rest of the night with an anger level slightly less than wanting to punch a man in the face.

This would be the last time I will allow something like this to happen to me. After the wedding, I’ve since removed my wedding site entirely and will not resume any action until I’ve created a new interview process for limited clients only. I don’t sacrifice my weekends so people can treat me like just another service provider.