Portrait of Matt Gilman

I recently had the opportunity to photograph Matt Gilman for my editorial portfolio. He's an incredible person and I was extremely excited to get to meet and shoot him. For those of you that don't know about Matt already and are wondering what's so amazing about him: Well, he's a fairly accomplished Bike Trials rider who regularly gives demos on the sport, and is getting better every time he rides. "Yeah, so what?"... So, he also just happens to be legally blind! Next time you're on your bike, try jumping off a few rocks with your eyes closed. Here's what he has to say about himself from his website...

I became blind due to diabetes at the age of 24. I have been riding bikes for most of my life and when I had lost my vision I thought that I would never be able to ride again. I couldn’t ride for 2 years between 2004 to 2006.

One day I decided to grab my trials bike and go out to the curb to just hop around and do the most basic moves. I quickly realized that I couldn’t even trackstand. I put my bike away in disappointment. A few days later I decided to learn how to trackstand again without vision. After a long uphill battle I have gotten back to, or near, the level of riding that I used to be at.

Now I ride almost everything that I could have ridden with sight but, I just had to figure out how to do it in my own way. There was no one to tell me how to go about it; I needed to figure it out on my own.

I'm happy to help Matt by providing him with some quality images for his website and other promotional efforts. If you find his story to be as inspirational as I do and would like him to speak to your group, I'm sure he would be happy to hear from you.

Here are some shots I took of Matt riding:

Behind the Scenes - Independent School's Admissions Photography

I just got back from shooting at Shore Country Day School in Beverly MA. This was my second trip to the school. This time they had me up to create the cover image to their viewbook. Every year the Head of School takes a group of 9th grade boys and girls on a 2 night camping trip to Squam Lake in Holderness NH. The idea was to have a photograph of the Head of School with several students having fun around a camp fire. I've shot campfires before, and I know they can be disastrous. The heat rising from the fire will cause light to bend and anyone behind that bending light will be out of focus. So my plan was to eliminate the fire from the equation. (more on that in a second)

Here's the result:

My idea was to shoot the Head and students having fun around a fake fire that I would make from a portable flash with a diffuser and an amber gel. That way they would all be crisp and clean and still look like the light was coming from where it was supposed to be coming from. No blur, no smoke in their eyes, and no weird shapes coming from the flames. I would then photograph the fire separately and shoot a lot of flames so I could pick the one that looks the best, and put it in later. I would also photograph the background and a tent separately so each element could be controlled to the exact look I was after.

It was a beautiful New Hampshire day. Thank goodness the weather cooperated with us.

Here's my gear packed onto the boat, ready to go to the island campsite:

Once on the island we surveyed the location and decided that big fire pit needed to be moved about 10 feet to the left... Have fun guys!

Oh, yeah... this was my 1st 18 hour day on my feet since I shattered my heel. The crutch didn't slow me down too much.

So here I am adding the amber gel to the Gary Fong diffuser for my SB800 flash unit. I also put some black foil in it to try to keep the light from shooting back to my camera. It did anyway, but the flare wasn't bad. I didn't want to flag it because I wanted to be able to use the rocks that were lit from this light as well.

Here is my SB800 "fire"... Setting it on the ground proved to be too low and cast shadows from the rocks on the students, so I eventually got out a floor stand and mounted it to that.

The craziest part of the day was after the shoot, getting the equipment packed up in the dark, and put on the boat to get back to the mainland. The moon wasn't even up, so it was pitch black dark. I wasn't sure we were going to make it back to the right dock! To give you an idea about just how dark it was, this image was shot at ISO 6400, f2.8 at a 20th of a second... Dark!

Here are the images that I used for the composite:

I started with image 1, the background. We weren't blessed with a very colorful sunset so I had to make due in post. I also noticed that if I aligned the image with the trees, the horizon was not level... oh well, I cant straighten the trees, so the horizon would be straightened later. I added the campers, image 2, shot with my portable flash. Then I added the image of the fire, #3. The final image actually contains 3 fire shots combined. Image 4... this is an image I shot using real studio strobes on stands powered by a generator. I brought these just in case I had trouble with the portable flash. I didn't have any trouble, but thought I should shoot it this way anyway, just to cover all the bases. I ended up using it to add detail in the foreground. And finally the tent shot, #5, was added. You can really see the difference in exposures between #1 and # 5, it was dark in the woods!

And here is how it all came together...

Super Baby Digital Composite Photo Illustration

Here is the "behind the scenes" I said I would do on my FaceBook page.

I had attended a seminar given by Blake Discher (carefull - browser hijack) a few months ago, and he mentioned something about an editorial assignment he was given where he was asked to shoot a baby in a heroic pose. He knew he couldn't do it the way the art director had in mind and talked him/her into doing something else. I instantly thought, "I can do that! No problem!"

So when my wife's cousin came to visit with her baby, I asked her to bring an appropriate wardrobe. We set up a tabletop with a blue seamless (I know, I should have used green, it would have saved a lot of time masking!) and two strobes. One head with a grid behind the baby and camera left, the other with a large softbox slightly camera right. I had his mother hold him by the waist for a few shots, then by the hands with his arms raised for a few. This way I could have shots of his upper body that I could merge with his lower body. Turns out, one shot was a nearly perfect pose, All I need to do was photoshop in his mid section from one of the raised arm shots.

With everything masked out it was time to make his backwards bib into a cape. I searched Flickr for an image of a red flag with a creative commons license. This one was perfect. Then I did the same thing with the grass. I had to modify the grass by duplicating it, enlarging it, blurring it and adding it back to the original. I did this several times to give it more depth.

The sky is from another shot of mine that I did for Brandweek Magazine of Ted Ward.

Everything was masked out, merged together, retouched and color-adjusted to make the final image. I hope you like it.

University Admissions Photoshoot Off The Grid!

This past Spring I was able to do a college viewbook photoshoot using all solar power! I had my doubts that the small setup they had at Shepherd University in West Virginia would be able to handle the draw from my lights, but I shot for several hours and not once had a bit of trouble. And I felt good that I didn't burn one bit of hydrocarbon in the process. It was definitely a first for me, but I'm sure it won't be the last.

Spring 2009 Educational Photography Highlights

I had another great Spring this year, shooting schools up and down the East coast - from Boston, MA to Pensacola, FL. This Spring I ended up photographing several independent schools, not just Universities and colleges but pre-school through high school as well. What a blast! Enjoy...

More Fun With Higher Education Photography

I was recently on a photoshoot for St. Mary's College of Maryland. Among the usual classroom, teacher/student interaction, campus-life candids, etc. The folks at the Admissions department wanted me to photograph "hallway bowling". This proved to be trickier than they thought it would be, and we had less than an hour to get it done. It was dark in the dorm hallway - too dark to capture anything sharply without pushing the camera to a grainy 3200 ISO. That wasn't going to cut it - I needed to light it. If you can imagine shooting down a long hallway, there's no place to put lights without them being in the shot. That wasn't going to work. How would the old guys have done it back in the day? I don't know, but this is the 21st Century... cue the magic of digital photography.

I started out by photographing the bowling pins, and the bowling... er... soccer ball in the empty hallway using the overhead lights and a tripod. I then had my assistant take a strobe on a stand and hold it over each additional element of the photograph... the bowler, and each group of spectators. Keeping the camera on the tripod made it easy to put all of the elements together into the final shot without seeing any of my lights.

Pretty cool. I love digital photography.

I won Gold at the Admissions Marketing Report (AMR) Higher Education Marketing Awards

The Admissions Marketing Report (AMR) Higher Education Marketing Awards results are in and a View Book that I shot won a Gold award! It was photographed for Richard Stockton College...

Shooting at the Pentagon - for an editorial assignment

I got a call from a magazine photo editor requesting I shoot a person who works at the Pentagon in Washington DC for a magazine article about the future of I.T. I came up with, among a few others, the idea of using doors as a metaphor. Unfortunately, the Pentagon is a very busy place with a lot of rules and regulations regarding when and where I could set up lights. Heck, it took me nearly 30 minutes to find my approved parking space, and another 30 minutes waiting at the gate for my escort! So, I was only able to set up in a small alcove by some doors that could not be opened. I did that shot, but also asked if I could shoot the subject with some glass doors in the middle of a hallway, as long as I didn't set up lights or disrupt the normal flow of traffic. I had to use a small hot-shoe flash, which I color balanced for the fluorescent lights in the hallway, and bounced off the wall to my right. The resulting image was OK, but not up to my standards:



So, I got on the computer and spent a few minutes tweaking it. I changed around some of the colors, darkened some areas, and removed the ugly signs. It went from a boring image that any competent photographer could make, to something I could be proud to say is mine. Here is the final image:



Another shot I did for the same article is below. This one is the original door idea i had. This shot is more interesting than the Pentagon shot, but the story behind it isn't...

Best of 2008 EDU (higher education photography)

So here are a few of my favorite EDU shots I've done in the past year. These don't have much in the way of stories to go with them. I usually spend a few days at a school (usually a college or university, but sometimes high schools prep schools or private schools) shooting. There's usually several shots that the client or art director is looking to capture, and with whatever time we have left over we spend capturing candid campus life images.

Best of my 2008 (and earlier) Corporate & Editorial photos - continued

OK, this image was shot for Boating Magazine for a story on dirty jobs in the boating industry. This man does the "gut-runs" at the big fishing tournaments in Ocean City MD. In otherwords, he takes a barge full of fish pieces from the piers to a place it can be dumped. The tournaments happen in August, the magazine was scheduled to run in June, and I was hired in Feb. As you can imagine, there were no guts to be had, in fact the gut barge was dry-docked for repairs at a garage just off the parking lot. Fortunately I was able to get low enough that you couldn't tell we were not on the water. All that was needed was a little retouching to remove some fence and part of a pickup truck. The boats you see in the background are actually dry-docked boats in the parking lot!



This one was done for a Halloween photo exhibit for the local chapter of ASMP. The theme was "trick or treat". I had seen the house around my neighborhood, and always wanted to shoot it. The owners have so much stuff all over the place it's insane. My picture doesn't do it justice. But it reminded me of the gingerbread house from "Hansel & Gretel", and this was the perfect opportunity. So I went out and bought a sweat suit and an old-lady wig, and recruited my Mother-in-law as a model. She refuses to look at this picture by the way. I shot her in the studio on a blue-screen, shot the apple seperately, and combined all 5 images together in photoshop to create the final image. It was recieved so well, it was used as the only image for the invitations and web promotions.



No real interesting story here, I just like the image a lot. It was shot for WatchTime Magazine. It is Robert Parker, the US's leading wine critic. My task was to create an interesting portrait at Mr. Parker's home that incorporated wine and watches. I saw the map of France and knew I wanted to incorporate that into the background, but the test images of my assistant were just too plain. Then I found some wine bottles, set them up on his kitchen counter, placed a light behind them, and shot through them to Mr. Parker. The resulting image of Mr. Parker is in the shape of a wine glass with the negative space of the bottles. Serendipity baby, serendipity!

Best of my 2008 (and earlier) Corporate & Editorial photos

Hey There,
Welcome to my blog. It's January, so I thought I should start out by showing you highlights from past jobs. Enjoy...




This 1st image was shot for M.I.T. for an article in their alumni magazine, to illustrate an article about the subject's donation to the school's new sci-fi library. I have been doing photo-composites a lot, but this was the first time I had created an entire fictional world. The biggest challenge was to make the subject come off in a flattering way, and minimize any characteristics that would indicate she was not a professional model...




This next image was shot for Brandweek Magazine of Geico's Ted Ward. It was for an article on the Marketers of the Year. Brandweek chose not to run this one, but ran a more conservative option (seen here) I did of Ward holding a photo-composited Gekko in his hand. I like this one better. It plays off the idea that Ward is an idea man, and he came up with a huge idea... Through the use of a fish-eye lens I made the tiny bulb he was holding into a huge "idea" above his head, and to make the idea even bigger, the bulb is being lit by the sun in the sky. Oh, and he's standing on a road as a symbol of auto insurance... I thought it was brilliant.



This Image was shot for the University of Buffalo's alumni magazine. This man works at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, so I was hoping to get him inside a diorama of cavemen or something similar, as if he had become a permanent fixture there, but the folks at the Smithsonian shot me down. He was also in the middle of doing a lot of travel and had a very limited timeframe available for me. So, since there was no budget for a scout day, and there would be no access to any exhibit areas, I asked my contact to think of interesting locations where I would be allowed to shoot. When I arrived on location, they had picked out one location, on a roof with the Capitol building in the background. From the Smithsonian, the Capitol was barely visible through the haze, and the sky was white. I was able to persuade them that we should shoot the front of the building even though "it's been done hundreds of times already". I pulled out my battery operated lights and started setting up just as the clouds began to break. I shot him exactly where I wanted, and in 15 minutes he was free to go. I then made a few exposures for the sky and the building. Back at my studio, I carefully blended all the different images together to make what you see here. Hopefully they've not seen something like this done hundreds of times!

Phew, I didn't think this would take so long. More later...

Thanks for looking!

Nicholas McIntosh Photography

4115 Church Rd.
Baltimore, MD 21102

4783 Shallow Ridge Rd.
Atlanta, GA 30144

(443) 804-8516

Digital photography on location for editorial & trade magazines, corporate annual reports & executive portraits, college university and other higher ed schools' view books and other promotional & advertising materials, environmental portraits and candid photographs, through the use of single images, digital composite, photo manipulation, and photo illustration.