phil kogan photography

I was shopping in Whole Foods one morning and as I exited the check out lane I noticed Elliot standing in the snack area.  I walked over and handed her my business card.  She looked at the card and before I could say much she let me know she had an MM account.  Two days later we were shooting  together at my studio.  The pics below reveal Elliot’s acting and dancing talents.  These proved quite valuable in our shoot.

For these shots I used a modified studio setup.  I’d been using two 4×8 foam core boards taped together to form a corner for several months.  But I still had to use white paper for the floor.  This meant having someone available to help move furniture and set up a backdrop stand for 9 foot seamless paper.  But in a recent visit to Home Depot I found a piece of 4x8x1/8″ white fiberglass that could be placed on top of my living room rug and used as a floor with the foam core corners.  A Home Depot employee helped me cut the foam core to 4×6 for ease of transport on top of my car.  I’m pleased with the result.  The new content aware fill feature in CS5 proved valuable in “filling” the ends of the rug with the white fiberglass floor.

I met Masha on Model Mayhem.  She is new to modeling and interested in starting a portfolio.  I’ve been testing some new lighting setups that provide more dramatic lighting and this would be a good opportunity to to try them out.  A couple of sample shots are below.  I used a 7″ reflector with a 20 degree grid as the key in the second shot.  A large softbox set about -3 f-stops  and placed almost at floor level is the fill.  The other shots use a 22″ beauty dish with a 40 degree grid as the key.  Fill is the same.  Touch of Makeup handled hair and makeup.

This was also the first shoot where I used a gray card — at the urging of my colleague Bo Zhang.  Tonight I began photo processing using the card.  It’s not the final answer in color correction But it’s a great place to start.