Phottix

Cosplay Shoot: Yuna

The Final Fantasy series have been close to my heart since I’ve been its avid fan for years. Recreating the scenes within the game has been one of my career goals in shooting cosplay. Yuna was certainly no exception. Few things that hindered me from working on a Yuna shoot, was finding the right cosplayer to work with. For me, casting and personification are a few of the crucial factors. Yuna stayed in the back burner (or what I personally call, concept cellar) until I had the chance to work with Nana this year. We were able to bring her in along with Enji Night for Comic Con Asia, so before the con mayhem began we took some R&R and brought them to the beach for the day. We did some beach sets, but it was this cosplay I was aiming to pull off.

Though we did the main shoot in Batangas, getting the perfect afternoon shot was another matter. I had to rely on my bank of sunset shots taken in various beaches in the Philippines and blended them in to get the clouds and afternoon glow look. If you’d notice in the video, the sun was really high and we hardly had any decent clouds to work with. That’s the downside in doing things on-location.. you are subject to the weather. When it’s good, it’s good… when it’s off, well you have to make do with it.

The ripples and water effects we’ve already banked before hand, and the sending spirits were a combination of shooting baby powder shooting out from the nozzle of the bottle, and then manipulating them with PS’s puppet warp feature. The glowing heads of the spirits were bubbles blown out from a bubble maker. The glow effect is rather rudimentary when you place multiple layers on top of it and blurring them.

This was shot around 530PM, at the height of “magic” hour.. which is technically about 15 mins worth of that awesome sun.

If you wanna see how we lit this scene up, here’s my behind-the-scenes clip.

Production Credits

Make-up / Hair: I-ann Monzon
Styling / Costume / Model: Nana Kuronoma
Shoot Production: Carlo Ocampo
Digital Imaging: Ghani Madueno
Special Thanks: Phottix Philippines

Check out my youtube channel for your regular glimpse behind the scenes! While you’re at it, drop buy the online store and get goodies from your favorite models!

For those interested in my commercial work, check out pointblankstudios.net and follow us at @pointblankmnl in IG.

Model Portfolio: Krizel

There is this strange charm with old gritty houses. This was sitting by Taal Lake, and obviously left to the elements despite having a resident caretaker. Their efforts were reduced to sweeping off the leaves around the property as no funds were laid out for the house’s maintenance. Remnant furniture remained, which was workable for a few layouts.

This shoot was a challenge at first given the scarcity of options in the venue, but the opportunity presented itself in isolating small pockets of the place and making the best out of the light streaming in from the windows. Weather was shifting between overcast and rain, so that further set the limits of the shoot to indoors. Luckily, the overcast sun gave that soft light we easily bounced back with reflectors.

Shooting glamour is all about a romanticizing a model’s moment in front of the camera. You work with a grain of truth, and then build a sensual fantasy around that. There is a suspension of disbelief at play through an exaggerated situation. Of course it’s not like you’d see a girl frolicking around an old house half-naked everyday. But somehow you have to build that premise with your images, and let the viewer relish that created reality for the duration they are looking at it.

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Back lighting when utilized right through reflectors can produce dreamy images. It automatically gives you highlights around the model’s outline.. and it’s just a matter of throwing enough light back to get a proper mid tone exposure. I intuitively over-expose by one (1) stop from whatever the meter is reading since back-lit images tend to confuse the camera’s internal light meter. Off-hand, if you get to use a 7D Mark 2, it’s metering system is smarter so the over expose becomes unnecessary.

Production Credits

Make-up: Jet Babas
Styling: Hannah Kim
Model: Krizel Valencia
Special Thanks: Alex Ruelo / Sunil Karamchamdani

Check out my youtube channel for your regular glimpse behind the scenes! While you’re at it, drop buy the online store and get goodies from your favorite models!

For those interested in my commercial work, check out pointblankstudios.net and follow us at @pointblankmnl in IG.

Model Porfolio: Kelly

Kelly was featured in FHM Philippines last year with this shoot. So for you guys who missed it, here are the rest of shots and outtakes that didn’t make it to the magazine.

This shoot was a combination of strobes and natural light with the latter serving as the main source. I was using the strobe to give the highlights around Kelly’s arms and shoulders, just enough to make her pop from the background a bit. Now if there’s any nuance with natural light is time. You are working against it since there is no constant natural light. As the day progresses, light shifts from east to west, sunrise to sundown altering the direction, quality and color temperature. You could say there are certain hours within the day where the light seems to be constant, but its changes are too minute to notice by the naked eye. What that means is you don’t sit on your ass thinking you’d be getting the same kind of shot thirty (30) minutes apart from each other.

kelly_bernal0658 — The highlight on the camera left hitting her arms and legs was from a strobe. It gave that extra kick to stylize the image a bit. But from a realistic point of view, the light source doesn’t make sense really. It made her look good, which was the only point I wanted to convey in this shot.

Weather (we like it or not…pun intended) puts in a wild card into the situation. Since it was overcast for most of the day bordering on drizzling, the sun’s position was masked by the clouds. What I had was a huge soft box effect, which provided a constant look of the light for a longer period, though the effect wasn’t flattering on the skin since it was on a colder tone. It was only game over when the sun finally starting setting down and the availability of light was cutting out dramatically. Color temperature sustained on the cold tone and just got darker.

Photo Gallery

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Production Credits

Make-up: Jet Babas
Styling: Hannah Kim
Model: Kelly Harris Bernal
Special Thanks: Alex Ruelo / Sunil Karamchamdani

Check out my youtube channel for your regular glimpse behind the scenes! While you’re at it, drop buy the online store and get goodies from your favorite models!

For those interested in my commercial work, check out pointblankstudios.net and follow us at @pointblankmnl in IG.

Model Folio: Cherry

Cherry has been one of our favorite go-to models. She was already one of our pretty guinea pigs back in the day when Raffy and I used to experiment with sets in his garage. That was about 7-8 years ago. It was reunion of sorts when I got to work with her again over a string of test shoots.

Phottix recently lent me a set of Indra 500 lights to try out in some my model folio / tutorial shoots. I’ve heard much about this strobe, and got excited at the chance of using it. The challenge is how to incorporate a strobe into a naturally-lit shoot.

The weather was quite unpredictable when we shot. It was cloudy one minute, and sunny the next. There were several instances of a good pose, but would lose out to bad lighting. Now this was where the Indra provided that consistency in maintaining the overall feel of the images. The highlights were still there despite the sudden changes in natural light. There were just minor adjustments in the shutter speed when relying on the Indras.

The first image was exposed to open sun when the clouds parted, while the third had more light assist coming from the Indra. You could see the stark differences in output even though I had two various workflows executed on them. One tell-tale sign is the washout background. I had makeshift relfector (a.k.a styrofoam) placed the camera left.

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Locations can be tricky in making a lighting guide since they’re not as straight-forward as shooting in a studio.

The center image was shot against a mirror found in the room. The frames gave an interesting foreground blur factor, and added texture in the overall image. It adds a tinge of “voyeurism” into the image when you add blurred foreground elements. Since it was getting dark (and about to rain), we had to simulate natural light streaming from a window. Combining the ambient lights (natural and artificial ones) found in the room and the Indras became the next challenge. Two sources were used: one outside the house streaming in, while the other acts a highlight / backlight indoors. Before placing in the strobes anywhere, you have to observe how natural light is falling into the location. You have to match to factors: direction and texture. The job of the strobe is to approximate how natural light behaves and thus just boosting the current lighting scenario. It is isn’t meant to replace natural light, but complement it.

As for the fan shot, an Indra was placed outside of the window covered with a thin white cloth to further diffuse the effect. The 2nd Indra had a white umbrella attachment, aimed to the wall. This further diffuses the light at the same time, giving off the natural ambient bounce of the room, which was warm.

When it came down the post-processing, I only did color grading. Several layers of it, masking out sections I didn’t want affected by the other. I also touched up the color balance settings, toying around with highlights and shadows more than the midtones.

An important takeaway from this shoot: location, location, location. How light falls and reflects in each location is unique, but the way it behaves is constant. It’s just a matter of harnessing it at the right time.

Production Credits

Make-up: Jet Babas
Styling: Hannah Kim (MIA)
Model: Cherry Kubota

Check out my youtube channel for your regular glimpse behind the scenes! While you’re at it, drop buy the online store and get goodies from your favorite models!

For those interested in my commercial work, check out pointblankstudios.net and follow us at @pointblankmnl in IG.

Shooting Special Effects

It may be boring for a good number of people, but this just brings out the geek in me. For several days now, Carlo (our digital imager) and I have been working on shooting material for future cosplay shoots. We deduced several elements that are commonly found in our cosplay images (flight, smoke, ice, sparkles, fire, water, etc…) and set out to produce an image bank we could use over and over.

Carlo much to my surprise, has extensive knowledge in special effects production design asides from his monster post production skills. He was based in several other studios all over the region (Singapore, Malaysia, etc…), this is what he picked up along the way.

The approach to coming up with cosplay images for us is beyond to just shooting people in costume. For those who have attended my talks, and heard me babble like a broken record about this, I never failed to repeat that exploring things outside of photography is best way to learn photography. I’ve gone as far as sitting in dress-making classes, and thinking of taking up make-up classes this year. Learning to do special effects is something I’ve always placed in my bucket list. To know the practical science is one, and shooting it is another.

Raffy and I have been doing this on a sporadic basis over the years, but we’ve limited innovation to what’s just needed for the current concept. I’m taking a different approach this time around and anticipating images as they come long so we don’t have to repeat reinventing the wheel so to speak. This should cut down on the shooting time for one idea altogether.

Yes, I am a die-hard fan of the Mythbusters.

Here’s Carlo (our Digital Imager) and my boys setting up for the next stunt.

Check out my youtube channel for your regular glimpse behind the scenes! While you’re at it, drop buy the online store and get goodies from your favorite models!

For those interested in my commercial work, check out pointblankstudios.net and follow us at @pointblankmnl in IG.

Cosplay Shoot: Yuna

Model Portfolio: Krizel

Model Porfolio: Kelly

Model Folio: Cherry

Centerfold: The Phottix Workshops

DPP 8th Anniversary

DPP Shutter Games

Shooting Special Effects

WPPP 2013