Seagram Pearce Photography Blog

Well I promised another blog post at lunchtime & it has just gone 13h17…

Let’s go back to the start of 2010. It was a great start to the year. In January 2010 I moved into my first ‘proper’ studio space in Loop Street (Cape Town). For the previous 2 years had been using my house which was fortunately large enough to setup everything I needed. However with working at home I found I never stopped working. There were no boundaries. Anything outside work took a serious nose dive & it wasn’t doing me any good.

So within the first couple weeks of getting my studio setup in Loop Street, I began to explore the city around me. Having already lived in town for 2 years, one very seldom actually just ‘walks’ the streets. Having my studio slam bang in the middle of the city bowl was my incentive to start getting out on the street more.

Now 1 block down from my studio is Greenmarket Square. More importantly, 1 block from my studio is a coffee shop called CRAVE. Yes, they apparently knew what their coffee would do to people. It certainly got me hooked. While walking down to crave several times a day (a guy needs his coffee!) I kept passing this tiny tobacco shop. It looked as old. Like Harry Potter kind of magical vibe. (let me just add that I’m not a fan of Harry Potter at all, but I have watched the first movie & fell in love with the ‘old’ streets & shops)

At this particular tobacco shop is the shopkeeper who after chatting to him for a bit actually has one incredible story. Get this. A tobacconist (for like 40 years) who has NEVER smoked a cigarette/cigar. How bizzare is that! In any case, as almost every old gentlemen I’ve met, he considered it a privilege to have his portrait taken. In fact, it was the other way around. It was an honor to take his portrait.

Not wanting to take too much of his time, I shot 2 portraits of him. He was an absolute gentleman about posing for me too. Subsequently to taking these shots in Jan 2010, they have won several awards & been featured on international photography websites. I made a few prints for him & dropped them off at his shop a few days later.

His reply?

“What a treat, thank you son.”

We’ve almost completely lost the people of his generation. Sadly so.

S.

I would like to think of myself as a busy photographer. Wait, no, I am incredibly busy. So busy apparently that I don’t take the time to update the blog. Which is a severe lack on my part, I know. I have friends who are based in LA, London, Australia and they’re all incredibly successful and busy photographers too & they somehow find the time to update their blogs on a vast majority of the things they get up to. Perhaps its a force of habit I’ve yet to learn.

So 2010 came & went so fast it’s just a white blur in the rear view mirror. There were so many incredible things I got to do (which as you might have noticed I haven’t blogged about yet!) during last year. I’ve flown to JHB so many times I can totally reenact 1time, SAA & Kulula’s in-flight demo plus most of the scripts the Captains say. But it has been a great year. I worked hard on laying down a foundation for where I want my career to go. You know, the 5 year plan? 10 years is a bit long for me, so 5 years is more than enough. Heck, 1 year can change my life (read: career).

I have made some advances however. I now ‘tweet’ or ‘twitter’ or ‘twatter’ or ‘twit’ on a regular basis. It took me a while to get onto it (perhaps like blogging? haha) but once I got going it is going full steam. I think its incredible to be able to stay up to date (to the very minute) with things & people you would otherwise never have contact with (Chase Jarvis, etc). It is also an incredible source of learning info. So let me add then that you need to follow me. www.twitter.com/seagrampearce

Without making this post too long & dreary, I would like to update you on what I am CURRENTLY busy with. Its a big one for me & my career. I’m only a week or so away from my first international advertising campaign. Global. It has been so far 3 weeks of almost non-stop prep. Every tiny fraction of detail needs to be discussed & approved by the client. Every possible aspect of light, lighting, composition, talent, props, environment is meticulously discussed & worked out. Its tedious. But you know what? I absolutely love it. This is what I live for as far as my career goes. I love the detail. I love the fact that I can give my opinion on how I think something could be done & everyone challenges me to why I think so. To me, this is what dream careers are made of. I hope that 2011 carries with it many more campaigns like the one I am currently working on.

So, to finish off, I hope everyone has a fantastic 2011 ahead for them, because I really do wish everyone has a super successful year. Your success is what helps boost the South African image, economy & can-do mentality.

ps: I promise at lunch time today I will take 10 minutes to update the blog again with some highlights from 2010. With images of course.

S.

Sibu is going over to UK I’m told & needed some strong editorial work in his book. The team really pulled together & worked at getting some awesome results!
We worked both studio & location to bring together a nice rounded set. From my point of view, working with Sibu was amazing. A guy who knows how to move, what looks good, he watches my lighting – all the combinations for a very successful model!

Model: Sibu @ LC Models
Makeup by Cindy Horton (www.cindyhorton.co.za)
Styling by Danine Naidoo
Photography & Retouching by Seagram Pearce (me)
(Click for larger images)

It’s been much to the amusement of everyone I’ve told recently, that I got commissioned to shoot dead cow carcass’. Probably one of the strangest job requests I’ve ever received! Certainly far from a glamorous fashion shoots everyone thinks photographers do day in & day out!

The shoots been done, but added to the long list of retouching which I’m wading through. The shoot also allowed for the first opportunity for me to use a certain retouching technique that I’ve yet found a use for! I’ll post more about that with the final images.

Sometimes it’s great to have a concept that doesn’t take a lot of production to do. Just a couple props & a bit of time. Even though I’m pretty busy almost all the time, I do try & shoot some of the things I want to in the evenings once the major rush has passed through the studio.

I had been carrying this idea around in my head for some time (along with a million others too). Seeing as this took very little production, it’s one of the ones I’ve managed to get around to first. All I needed was a goldfish in a bowl… and a goldfish hat. Thankfully with a couple calls I was able to track down a pet shop in the Cape Town CBD (one would be surprised how scarce they are!) that had a ‘goldfish starter kit’. Excellent. Not only did I have what I wanted, I now also had a complete kit for maintaining my new studio friend. The lady at the pet store was somewhat horrified at me when I asked if I could bring him back after the shoot. I guess this is the price this little guy has to pay for a minute of fame… living with me.

So other than the actual helmet on the goldfish, there was little PS that went into the final shot. Here’s the buildup to the final image:

The RAW shot of the bowl. Mr Goldfish was actually IN the bowl here, but he was swimming around at the back – so thats why you can’t see him.

I knew for the final layout I didn’t want a complete bowl showing. It wasn’t neccessary to convey the final message. So I moved it over in the frame, giving me some nice negative spacing for text & product placement.

I now added Mr Goldfish into the bowl from a seperate shot (at the exact same placement). This took a bit longer than I imagined. Goldfish don’t exactly swim in the direction you always want them to… and then also in a nice relaxed, non-threatened oh-gosh-somethings-chasing-me kind of fashion.

Next I popped over to Stock.Xchng to see what they had as far as helmets went. They’re a great royalty-free stock library! I eventually found this helmet, which I hoped would work out well. I had about another 8 options, but none of them had the straps & they all had the wrong perspective angle on the helmet for my Mr Goldfish.

A bit of photoshop-love later, we had our helmet on our fish. Took a fair amount of warp-tool to get it looking right. Added a shadow-cast that helped make it look real & a colour tinge to make it look convincing too. Other than this, the final image got a bit of colour correction & product added on right.

So I seem to have the worst time when it comes to blogs. Even at the point where I decided that I was going to now consistently keep a blog going, I changed hosting from a very stable, yet insecure option. My site got hacked a couple too many times for my liking. Every time it was a major setback as regards safety for my visitors & also it hurt my long hard time spent massaging google to like me.

Well, we’re now on fresh new servers (yay) which promise to be a much better option (albeit more expensive) for all. I’m also searching furiously for a new website for my main portfolio which I’m happy with. It’s hard, as I’m terribly picky about almost every aspect. The current one I designed & created myself by hand. It tooks days. Updating it takes a bit too much effort these days compared with how much time I actually have. So the logical step is to find a more streamlined option: flash content management system. So stay tuned for that one once I find something I’m happy with.

And this brings to a conclusion the first post on my new (haha, I don’t even want to tell you how many times I’ve said that line) blog. With better safer hosting, this blog shouldn’t go anywhere hopefully. I know not many people read my blog (yet), but I’ll try pump some traffic through here soon.

Till later