Posts Tagged ‘Mastering Lighting’

Holiday season brings holiday cheer, and what’s more cheerful than getting what you want at ridiculous discounts?

At the end of October, we were pleasantly surprised to sell out our inventory of SlickforceSoftlights at Stan Lee’s Comikaze. We’re happy to announce that the new shipment has arrived, and we’ve created some holiday promo art to illustrate to our ever-growing audience just how much our learning tools and tutorials can help.

The Slickforce System holiday spot features the talented and ever-professional actress Anna Adjian as our young artist, embarking on a journey of discovery as she learns how to capture her creativity more easily and effectively.

As those who purchased the Mastering Lighting box sets already know, Slickforce Softlights are perfect for pre-visualizing your photoshoots, using your favorite action figures as stand-ins for your models. And who better to model for our stunning softlights than Wonder Woman herself? (and a wind-blown Kotobukiya Bishoujo Wonder Woman at that!) Special thanks to the Hulk, Prince Adam and Hoth Wampa for orchestrating this beautiful lighting setup for our iconic heroine.

Our Black Friday sale starts today at SlickforceStore.com, and you can pickup a 2-pack of Softlights for only $19.95. Or, if you’re ready to get serious about your art, check out our holiday deals on Mastering Lighting, Mastering Retouching and Mastering Compositing—now available at our lowest prices ever.

Wishing you all a very Happy Thanksgiving, and we look forward to helping you brighten your holidays!

Nick’s Lighting Journal is included with Mastering Lighting: Volume One DVD and VIP Box Sets

SlickforceSoftlight™ comes with silver umbrella, removable diffusion cover, power-pack and two stand-extension poles.

I’m excited to release this 8-minute video documenting the making of Mastering Lighting. It showcases the incredible amount of teamwork that went into creating a learning experience that didn’t suffer from the usual tutorial boredom. It’s also a fun look at the challenges we faced trying to squeeze PhotoKamp into an easily-distributable format, including scanning a model in 3D, taking you to my favorite locations virtually, and putting the viewer inside my head for a first-person POV on set.

We hired more than a dozen visual effects artists in five countries to help us build the warehouse, the Aryn model, and a full library of lights and camera gear. Being new to VFX, I was naive at best, and I would have been in way over my head if not for the guidance and contributions of good friend and VFX supervisor Raffael Dickreuter.

Dickreuter gave us the blueprint for creating a mini-VFX house within SlickforceStudio, and together we spent endless hours building render farms and network servers, programming camera moves, and adjusting lighting and texturing from the various artists. It’s safe to say that without Raff I’d still be working on this today.

If you haven’t checked out Mastering Lighting yet, you can learn all about it right here. SlickforceSystem.com is offering a Fall promotion for $30 and free U.S. Shipping, enter code MLFALL30 at checkout. Also, for a limited time you can order additional SlickforceSoftlight’s with your order.

This is an excerpt from a recent interview I did with Rebecca Britt for Fstoppers. Read the full interview here.

Fstoppers/Rebecca Britt: I’m always fascinated when a photographer uses their talents for a greater cause than themselves. SlickforceGirl is a commercial and creative pinup brand that helps raise awareness for women’s causes and breast cancer. I recently had the opportunity to review creator Nick Saglimbeni’s Mastering Lighting series, and I wanted to sit with Nick to discuss his SlickforceGirl campaign and how he uses the techniques taught in Mastering Lighting within the campaign.

FS: I’ve been a fan of your SlickforceGirl brand for a couple of years now. Can you explain to our readers what started the idea of a SlickforceGirl?

Nick Saglimbeni: I originally created SlickforceGirl because I found myself at a crossroads in my art. My career first gained traction in the urban glamour market, an arena which boasts huge fan followings but very little recognition outside of that world. The models are gorgeous and every bit as talented as — and in some cases, more hard-working than — their “mainstream” counterparts, but because they are curvy, or ethnic, or short, they are historically limited to roles such as “music video girls”.

I’ve always seen color, curves and shape as assets rather than hindrances, and I think I instinctively knew how to photograph these women in a way that was different from what had been done before in that world. I wanted to create a diverse universe full of strong female characters for a new generation that isn’t used to every character just being tall, skinny and white.

FS: The scale of your Astronaut Vanessa character looks massive, it looks more like a movie. How did you choose your location and why?

NS: Visually speaking, Vanessa’s story was the most logistically difficult to shoot, but it’s also the most excited I’ve ever been on set. It felt like we were making a feature film, and we all turned into producers trying to find ways to get feature-film production value into a photo shoot budget. I’ll never understand this new era of just compositing everything onto a stock photo background. Being on location is at least half of the fun, and it changes the energy of the shoot dramatically.

We found a huge spaceship set that was built on a sound stage for a sci-fi movie, and they hadn’t broken it down yet. It was architecturally perfect, but aesthetically very gray and drab. I wanted a very stylized color palette for our pop version of deep space, similar to the bioluminescent scenes in James Cameron’s Avatar.

One of the ways we achieved this was through costume and glam. We originally planned on putting model Vanessa Veasley in an actual NASA Mercury suit, but quickly discovered they were so bulky that it was impossible to shoot anything even remotely sexy. So we had her space suit custom-made, and used fabrics with a reflective sheen to capture the “monitor glow” around the spaceship.

FS: How did you approach the lighting for this concept?

NS: For the cockpit scene, we had two lighting motivators — the interior glow from the monitors and bridge controls, and the exterior glow from the stars. There’s really no manual on lighting for outer space, so I looked at old American Cinematographer articles on Armageddon and Terminator 2 for inspiration.

I didn’t want to deal with the spill from green-screen, so we built two 12×12 white griffolyns outside the cockpit window and fired 4 heads on two 2400w/s packs into them. Compositing is much easier in stills than in motion-picture, so you can use whatever color you want to end up with. We then created “nebula hits” by pointing a couple of strips and softboxes with pink and purple gels directly at Vanessa. The trick with making outer space ambience look believable is to let some of the scene fall completely to black, so we were very careful not to overlight the cramped space. For the interior cockpit glow, we placed small double-silked strip lights with steel blue party gels around the ship and behind camera.

This scene was shot at ISO 100 on a 50mm lens (medium format). Even though we were wide, the biggest challenge is carrying the depth of field at that speed because theoretically both Vanessa and “the stars” needed to be in focus. Ultimately, we were able to get the light barely to an F4/5.6 split, and then I set the lens to F8 and let it underexpose a stop-and-a-half, except for a few highlights on her suit. It would have taken too much power to get our ambience higher, and if there were really stars outside that window, the light that reached the ship would be perfectly believable a few stops under key. Also, blues and purples saturate better at a darker luminance than warm colors so it ended up working in our favor.

(Read the complete interview on Fstoppers here.)

— My thanks to Rebecca and the Fstoppers team for a great interview!

After spending two long years and countless hours in a seemingly-forgotten corner of Los Angeles putting together our latest tutorial, it has been an absolute thrill hearing from so many of you about Mastering Lighting: Volume One. For those still curious, here’s a look at the first chapter of the series.

Fortunately, some pretty big critics seem to be in agreement with your positive comments, and Mastering Lighting has been getting rave reviews from these incredible photography sites. (Click images below to read the full reviews.)

I am also proud to announce the simultaneous release of two additional language versions. Mastering Lighting: Volume One has been meticulously translated into German and Spanish, by photographers Stefan Rasch and Adrian Orozco respectively. For those viewers who want the best of both worlds, the SlickforceStore is offering a combo bundle which features the German or Spanish download and the English Box Set (Standard or VIP Edition). Previews of each language are below. Click here for more information and to see all language options in our store.

And finally, by popular request, we’ve now introduced VIP Box Set Trilogy combos, allowing you to complete your SlickforceSystem library collection while adding the convenience of the downloads. Each trilogy set includes Mastering Lighting: Volume One, Mastering Retouching (Levels 1-7) and Mastering Compositing (Levels 1-5). Compare all options here.

Thank you for continuing to send your feedback, it is incredibly helpful in our quest to continually improve our learning series’!

It’s been a bit crazy this week in the studio, with the Slickforce team fielding shipping palettes from multiple factories overseas. We’ll do a proper post in the next week or so, but in the meantime, here is a quick look at the beautiful Mastering Lighting: Volume One Box Set packaging. While supplies last, you get the Slickforce Softlight reference toy free with your order, which you can see hiding on the left side of the photo above. All Slickforce products ship anywhere in the world—special launch pricing for a limited time, order here.

As an art-house, the SlickforceStudio team takes a lot of pride in just about everything we produce. But every few years, a project comes along that requires unprecedented levels of attention—an all-consuming energy beast that galvanizes the team and challenges us to power-up our skills and work together to break new ground.

Ever since the release of Mastering Retouching, my inboxes have been filled with requests for a lighting tutorial. Producing five PhotoKamp workshops provided me an incredible opportunity to work side-by-side with up-and-coming photographers and learn which teaching methods stick. Aspiring artists want to know how to create the worlds that have existed only in their minds…until now.

I’m proud to announce Mastering Lighting: Volume One, available for early pre-order now and shipping in early January. Taught in classic SlickforceSystem style, we’ve combined hundreds of your questions into a revolutionary new teaching tool.

In Volume One, I’ll take you through some of my biggest shoots, completely reverse-engineering the lighting setups. I cover our most highly-requested topics, such as redirecting the sun, working with fog, balancing artificial and natural light, finding the right composition, motivating your light sources, and much more. Best of all, you’ll get to set up the shot and light right alongside me, thanks to the incredible first-person perspective experience created by our visual effects team.

And since more than half of our customers preferred the library-quality Collector’s Box Set for Mastering Retouching and Mastering Compositing (artists like awesome tangibles, go figure!)… well, we’re just going to have to top ourselves on this one. The first 250 customers that order Mastering Lighting: Volume One will received a FREE Softbox reference light toy. I’ll elaborate more as we get closer to launch, but trust me, you’ll want this one on your shelf.

I am indebted to the wonderful Slickforce team who worked so hard to make this series a reality, and a very special thanks goes out to YOU for all of the questions, feedback and support you’ve sent us over the years. You’ve helped us create a fantastic new way to learn about lighting and photography. And I can’t lie… this one was just a little too fun to make. If you don’t believe me, check out the official trailer above.

Special early pricing ends November 30, so pre-order now at MasteringLighting.com!