I had the pleasure of working with Rachel Lyn again this past Sunday.  The photo session was at a workshop in Pontiac with David Birdsong.

Rachel is always a professional and very creative.  When I pulled Domo out of my camera bag she lit up and gave me some fantastic poses.  Modeling with a prop or product is not the easiest thing to do and Rachel seemed like a natural.

I look forward to working with Rachel again soon. If you need product photography for your catalog or website and need a photographer and model contact me!

I was having a bad day on Friday and my friend Marlo, owner of Stage Level Producton & Promotions, called me.  She said that a local band was playing at The Northern in Midland.  Midland isn’t that far of a drive and I needed to clear my head – so I went.  Cygnus is a cover band from Bay City and they put on a great show.  I got a few good pictures and had a good night.  The Northern is a great venue and I hope that they continue to promote the local band scene.

I’ve heard a few photographers say how they like green screen photography.  I have never been a fan of it for still photography.  Most pictures I’ve seen look two dimensional or off kilter.  There were times I liked the use of green screen like putting a child athlete on a magazine cover or some weird fantasy image.  But reading more about green screen I realized that most of the images that were making me not like the process were just not very well done images.  I had tried to do green screen a few times and couldn’t seem to get the background removed.  But there was a time when I did some headshots for a billboard campaign and the advertising company took the shots and removed the green.  These looked great.  I figured it was just my Photoshop skills that were lacking.

So over the weekend I was dropping some equipment off at a friend photographers house and he showed me the green screen software he uses.  I was impressed.  Then he downloaded a green screen image I had taken (and I had failed miserably to remove the background), put it into the software, removed the green and put a background on it.  The process was fast and looked great!

The software was PhotoKey from Fxhome.  I went to the site, downloaded the demo version of PhotoKey 4 Pro and was sold!  This is fantastic software and now I’m excited about green screen photography.  I have already purchased a license and started using it for a company I work with.  Instead of taking new employee pictures for different events I have one picture and can change the background to represent the season or promotion that they are currently using.  With the batch image process I can update every employee with a few clicks and send the new images to my client.

Here is an image of my first attempt with the software:

This portrait was taken at the Red Eye Café in Old Town Saginaw.  The model had contacted me through ModelMayhem.  It took us a few weeks to get together (because of conflicting schedules) but the end results were fantastic.  Lakeshia was a pleasure to work with and the Red Eye turned out to be a great backdrop.

Do you need a portrait?  Ever considered modeling and need pics for your portfolio?  Contact Defoe Photography in Saginaw, MI

As part of an online Tri-City Photographer/Model group we held another group shoot over the weekend.  This time it was at a small farm in Midland, MI.  The day was unseasonably warm for the middle of November and the location was beautiful.  The turn out for this group photography shoot was small but those that participated had a great time and we got some fantastic pictures.  The model featured above is Jovie.  She is from Midland and has been working in Detroit a lot recently.  I’m not sure what the product is but I’ve been told to look for her in a tv commercial soon.