Copycat CDs and they aren't from China

If I offended anyone by the title of this post... too bad. It's a fact that China is one of the worst offenders when it comes to piracy of any type. Although CD piracy isn't as common as it once was, that activity is simply being replaced by other forms of media including DVDs and Internet music. But I digress...

The point of this post is to show you one of the CD covers I imitated using a photo I took of Stacy a few weeks ago. I mentioned in my post about the shoot that I was going to mock up several CD covers for her since she is a dancer that specializes in break dancing and is really into hip hop and rap music. The first cover I copied was Tupac's Best of Tupac Part 1: Thug CD. You can the original and the mock up below.

Original CD cover courtesy of Amazon.com

Mocked up CD cover (as if you needed to be told).

For the mock up, I had Stacy pose in a similar way. Then I completed the look in Adobe Photoshop. I used color adjustments to get the gold tone. I then created several layers to add the advisory label. Finally, I created a gradient for the title bar and added the text. Overall, I think it looks pretty close to the original. I plan to mock up the other CD covers in the next few weeks and I will post those as well. Let me know what you think!

Breakin' all the rules

Here, Stacy is in her traditional break dancing outfit.

She is part of Austin's Urban Transit crew. Don't let her petite

size fool you, she can bust a move with the best of them.

A week ago, I photographed Stacy, a local dancer. When I met her about a year ago, she was working her way through college teaching dancing to kids and waiting tables. Since that time, we have continued to stay in touch. She has always talked about her plans to go to Las Vegas to dance professionally. Well, now she is a college graduate from Texas State and she is getting ready to fulfill her dream. My part in that plan is simple. She needed some photos in various dancing poses as well as some headshots for her resume. The other week, we were finally able to coordinate a photo shoot in Austin. The two images you see here is only a small sample of what we did. Since Stacy is a trained dancer, she is well versed in all genres of dance. We took photos of her doing ballet, contemporary, break dancing, and 80's Flashdance style poses. In fact, Stacy is part of a dance crew in Austin called Urban Transit. If you haven't heard of them, check them out on YouTube. They are really good. The crew participates in competitions all over Texas.

But back to the photo shoot... Stacy feels much more comfortable being serious or even goofy in front of the camera than she does being sexy. But trust me, she can do the latter very well too. After taking several hundred pictures of Stacy in various dance outfits and poses, we transitioned to more sexy FHM or Maxim magazine style photos. Finally, we wrapped up the day by posing in the style of some of Stacy's favorite hip-hop artist's CD covers. I plan to Photoshop the copy onto the images to mock up the CD covers with Stacy on them instead of Tupac, 50 Cent, and Lil' Kim.

This pose is a copy of a Tupac CD cover from his album

Best of Tupac Part 1: Thug. Stacy posed in the style of three

different artists' CD covers including Tupac, 50 Cent, and Lil' Kim.

Stacy, I hope you had fun and I wish you the best in Vegas. If you make it as a dancer, drop me a line and let me know. I'd love to make it out there to see you. Of course, I will expect complimentary tickets and backstage passes! :)

Fashion for everyone

A few weeks ago I met Maddie, a college student, at a restaurant in Austin. At one point during the evening, we started talking about modeling. That discussion led to Maddie mentioning that she wanted to do some fashion modeling. Of course, I took the opportunity to mention that I was a photographer. And the rest, they say, is history.

So fast forward several days to last week. Maddie and two of her college friends met me at my studio. They brought their iPod nano full of music, some wine (for them, not me), and a great attitude. Her friends were there to help Maddie with posing ideas and they were fabulous. While I adjusted lights and made sure that Maddie was looking her best, her friends were instructing her on what pose to do next.



Maddie brought over three dresses and I used three backdrops to give us some different looks. We spent about two hours doing the shoot and took nearly 600 images. As you can see from the images, Maddie is very comfortable in front of the camera. Not to mention, she looks great! I think she definitely has a future in modeling.


For all of these images I used my Alien Bees studio strobes. I just recently purchased an Paul C. Buff foldable giant softbox and I used that as my key light. For the fill, I used some white foam core. And I placed a bare strobe with a 20 degree grid as my back light. I processed the images in Adobe Lightroom 2 and did some final clean up in Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Let me know what you think. Leave a comment on the blog. Thanks!

Blogs, Blogs Everywhere

The other day my sister asked me to help her design and upload a customized blog header for her blog, Life on Laurel. She has been blogging for about 4 months now using Blogger and up until that time, she had only used a text header provided for the template she selected as her blog theme.

When she first asked me to help her do this, I asked her what she had in mind. She indicated that she wanted something with a street sign from Laurel Street as the main image. My first design was a good attempt, but it was neither symbolic nor meaningful.

So I searched through images and found one of a sidewalk with the word Laurel in decorative tile in the concrete. If you have never been to New Orleans, then you might not know that many of the streets feature their names in the sidewalks at the intersections. Anyway, I took the image and added the other text using Photoshop CS3. The whole process took only 30 minutes. The hardest part was trying to get the colors to match the theme of the blog template my sister selected.

This is the final version of the new blog header I created for
my sister’s blog. She asked me to help her design a customized
header the other day. 30 minutes later, I came up with this.

Once I finalized the design, adding it to her blog was easy. So, for those of you who want to know how to do customize your Blogger header using an image, here are the steps (shown for a Mac; PC steps may be slightly different):

1. Log into your Blogger account
2. Go to your Dashboard
3. For the blog you want to customize, click the ‘Layout’ link
4. In the Header box, click the ‘edit’ link
5. Under Image, click the ‘Choose File’ button
6. Browse to the image file you want to use and click ‘Choose’
7. Under Placement, click the ‘Instead of title and description’ radio button
8. Click ‘Save’
9. Now you can click the ‘Preview’ button to see what your new header will look like
10. Finally, click ‘Save’

That’s it... you’re done! Wasn’t that easy? There is one thing you should know before uploading an image though. The standard Blogger header width is reportedly 660 pixels. The idea being that if size your image to approximately this width, it will fill the entire header. When I did this, however, the image overlapped the header border on the right side. I could have selected the ‘Shrink to fit’ option when uploading the image, but I didn’t want to let the software determine how the image would look. Instead, I downsized the image to 650 pixels wide and re-uploaded it. When I did that, the image fell entirely within the border.

Why is this design so much more symbolic and meaningful? I’m glad you asked. The symbolism comes from a play on words. The title of the blog is Life on Laurel and if you look at the design, the words “Life on” are on the word “Laurel”, which is a play off of the title. Secondly, the words “Life on” only touch the first two letters “LA”, which is the abbreviation for Louisiana, because while the blog is about life in New Orleans, it is also about life as a Louisianian. The meaning comes from the fact that it is an image from Laurel Street and not something artificially created. So, the new design satisfies both characteristics very well.

The bottom line is customizing your blog is not that hard. In fact, it’s downright easy and it gives your blog an identity of its own, separating you from the crowd. According to Technorati, there are 112.8 million blogs. The even more amazing statistic is that there are 175,000 new blogs created everyday. So, you can see that adding a touch of customization to your blog might help to distinguish yours from the plethora of others.

Speaking of blogs, there are several others I follow. Most are from professional photographers and graphic designers, which I will blog about later, but some blogs I follow are from my friends. I would like to mention two in this post specifically. First, Piper Kinney Photography has a great blog where she shows off some of her recent work as well as discussed things that are going on in her life. She specializes in on location, natural light, children and family photography based in Humble, Texas. If you are looking for a very artistic and creative child photographer, check out Piper Kinney Photography. Second, Jackie’s Magic is a very interesting blog created by a very soulful and thoughtful person. Her posts are compelling and thought provoking. Interestingly enough, I designed Jackie's blog header as well. Both blogs should be added to your “Things I need to check out regularly” list.