M O N K E Y S  A R E  B E T T E R

Only For The Night Myspace Page

This is a Myspace layout I did for the band Only For The Night, this includes the photo shopped photos taken by Andrew Hunt, and animated flash banner to help promote the band. You can view the live version here.

Vintage Style Photographs

So I've been seeing a few designers around the net using what looks like late 70s early 80s era vintage photos. I thought I would give it a shot. I think I have it figured out, but I had to keep it subtle because its for work. Now if I could only find a band to let me do their photo shoot like this I think I could really make them look unique.

Monkey around with Paul Frank

I'm really happy with this Paul Frank image, the fun thing about my job is I get to use a different style for almost everything. Just have to try to resemble the brand we're promoting. Oh yeah this is for active.

This is an image I made as part of the same project to help promote dress sales, I was going for sort of a t.v. show type of theme, does that make sense?

Rock & Roll Photo

So I've had a couple of people ask me how I did the photos for the tssk photo shoot which has led me to this, my first ever tutorial. Don't worry, for those of you who are lazy, you can simply download this action and get right to it. Photoshop is amazing for those of us who lack certain lighting abilities as well as high quality photography equipment, following I will show you how to look like a pro or at least attempt to (basic knowledge of photoshop is assumed). Check out Atiba Jefferson, this is my inspiration.

1) Take a photo, this is probably the most important step, you can only fake so much in photo shop. You need to make sure your subjects work well with the background/location think about colors lights and "image". Arrange your subject(s), these guys didn't just stand where they were on their own. Lastly try different angles expect to get about 5 or 10 good shots out of 100. We can't get into all of the photo composition techniques here, but the above are the basics. I'll be using this photo...

2) After you take a photo, open it in photoshop, then duplicate the original photo layer. Go to image, adjustments, shadows and highlights. Make sure you click show more options, then crank the shadow, highlight, and midtone contrast sliders all the way up click ok. It should now look like this...

3) change the new layer blending to "overlay", soft light works nicely too. Adjust the opacity to your liking, I set it at 40%. You'll notice this brings out a lot of the detail as well as the colors...

4) Create an adjustment layer by clicking on the little halfmoon icon at the bottom of the layers pallet, choose "Hue Saturation", set the saturation to -50, click ok.

5) Create a vignette by creating a new layer and selecting all (cmd/ctrl a), then chose select, modify, feather, I chose 30 for an image this size, click ok. Then select inverse and fill with black.

5) If your happy with that, then your done. To make things a little more dramatic and a bit less noticeable I change the vignette layer blending to overlay and take the opacity down, on this I set it at 60%.

From here you can do any number of things to help bring out the mood of the photo, you can play with the different settings for each of the adjustments as well as add more layers. The last thing I do is once I'm satisfied with the image I flatten it and then run a sharpen filter. This makes it look like I have a much nicer camera than I actually do brings out a little more detail...

The above is the finished product, of course you can take this as far as you like or make it much more subtle. Let me know if you have any questions, and I would love to see what you come up with, thanks for checking it out!

The Sleeping Sea King Poster 2

Here is another poster for the Sleeping Sea King. This time they asked me to use one of photos I took of the band and add some space to the bottom where they could write info about upcoming shows as well sign the poster for fans. They also wanted to go for an icy theme on this one, to get a "fire and ice" type of feeling going.

In other news, I went with these guys to Warped Tour in Pomona, where they headlined the Ernie Ball stage, I'll try to get some of the photos I took up in a few days. I've also had a few people ask how I did the promo shots for these guys I posted a while ago, I'll try to put up a tutorial on it in a couple days so you to can look like a pro photographer.

TSSK Sampler

Finished up the Sleeping Sea King's promo pack including photography and art for the sampler "A Celebration of the Soul" and a poster to accompany it. Click the images above to see large scale versions of the work. Hopefully they'll let me do the art for their full length when it comes out. Ok bed time, have to do some more work for Traveler Guitar tomorrow.

TSSK Photoshoot

On April 23rd 2008 I went on an exciting journey with my friends "The Sleeping Sea King" to the Salton Sea to shoot some photos. The above images are the result of a day drinking beer, toting around a tripod and camera, and few hours of photoshop. Some of the most fun I've had in a long time. I'll post up the process in photoshop later so you can copy the steeze.