case studies: taran morgan
bio Background
Taran Morgan has been advising us on our photography products for the last few years, ever since he discovered us through version 1 of Exposure. Taran claims that all of his photos are processed with Alien Skin plug-ins.
From Taran:
The first time I became interested in photography I was probably around 8 years old. My older cousin had a darkroom and he brought me in to show me how to develop a negative from scratch. Everything was so clandestine. Here, in a room with a dim red light, the process was revealed to me... I got to see a blank sheet of paper mysteriously come to life by soaking it in a clear liquid bath, I must have thought it was magic. As a kid you remember the craziest things, and I remembered the red light and the smell of the chemicals, the picture is clear in my mind to this day. I was 8 and I must confess I had the world pretty much figured out... then, along came photography. Here was something I couldn't possibly comprehend. There were lenses to focus, film to load and unload, cameras, flashes, enlargers, chemicals, a dark red room that nobody could leave or enter, stopwatches, and an awful smell. Who on earth would go through all this trouble? And for what? So began my journey.
Taran Morgan currently works as a location photographer and fine art printer in South Florida. "I specialize in weddings because they present new challenges every time. The family, two people, stripped down and building something from scratch. As a photographer you are always looking for raw emotions, the joy, it's a real rush if you happen to capture a special moment." In his spare time he photographs rare and endangered North American orchid populations in the Fakahatchee Strand. "Orchid poaching is a problem people don't think about too often. Documenting these beautiful flowers on the brink of extinction gives me a chance to change the world with photography... once people see a ghost orchid they know it's worth protecting, so the more people know, the better". Taran is also finishing his first photo book featuring travel photography from India, Greece, and Wales. You can find out more about him at his photoblog: www.artistwithlight.com.
Bokeh Tutorial 1:
Theory: Bokeh is for more than just background blur and subject isolation, show you love someone by adding hearts to the scene.
Objective: Change a light pattern on a dark garment to hearts.
Let's be honest, it's not often people wear polka dot shirts or dresses anymore, I'm not sure why exactly, but this tutorial can apply to almost any bright pattern on dark cloth. Bokeh, as we shall see, is not only helpful for subject isolation, but can also render certain types of clothing with a little touch of romance. Normally I apply bokeh so as to blur my subject against a busy background, but in this frame our subject is well isolated... while this may not seem a great candidate to show off the background blur capabilities of bokeh, it demonstrates how round bright spots can be recreated to make hearts. These bright spots are sometimes incorrectly referred to as specular highlights. Let's get to work on this unconventional application of Bokeh.
Figure 1: Our subject Estela is nicely isolated, but her outfit can be retrofitted to hearts instead of dots.
Figure 2: Lets just keep her face sharp. As you can see, the selection is quite small. The settings are heart of hearts, lens of love @ blur 20%... a setting straight out of the box.
Figure 3: With a couple of strokes of the history brush to return detail to our subjects arm, our outfit change is complete. As you can see, the dress now features heart shaped highlights. As if heart sequins had been added to the dress.
Now, this is easy, because we know what bokeh can do, and we setup our model to wear a dress we knew would work. But we shouldn't discount bokeh's ability to turn any bright highlight to a nice, perfectly shaded heart.
Bokeh Tutorial 2: Toy Camera
Theory: Toy cameras are all the rage, but there is no need to go out and get a Holga or Lomo, it can be done digitally with a few clicks in Bokeh.
Objective: Blur an image in a way that looks like it was taken with a toy.
Carlos and Liz are well isolated in this picture, but it's just too clean for me. Lets first use Bokeh to simulate a plastic lens.
Figure 1a: Our original picture, what a handsome couple.
Figure 1b: We needn't use Bokeh to always blur the background, indeed, this effect is designed to blur our subject and simulate a medium format toy camera with very narrow focus and distortion in the lens. The selection is an easy one. I tend to stick with the old portrait rule of the eyes being the point of focus, and then everything else is relatively inconsequential. Since this photo had a little too much depth of field for my taste, I thought it best to use Bokeh to soften things up. The Bokeh Amount slider is at 20% with Nonagon as the shape. You can see the rest of the settings and the selection in the screen shot.
Figure 2: The compressed sense of scale is nice, but this photo is still too clean for my taste. Time to add a texture.
Figure 3: Almost any distressed metal texture can work, but I use this copper one for a lot of my photos. Just drag it on top of the photo by using Photoshop’s move tool (V).
Figure 4: Changing the texture layer to soft light gives us this. Dirty! I like it. We are almost there.
Figure 5: A few strokes of the history brush to peel back the blotches from the texture on the faces of my subjects, then washed in Alien Skin's Exposure 2 with the Fuji Pro 160C setting (magenta cast).
As you can see, this really took less than five minutes, and you don't have to wait for the developer to get you your prints.
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