Living at Home

Evan Mery January 12, 2023

In mid to late July 2020, I moved back home with my Parents. The move was mostly due to the second wave/lockdown/whatever you wish to call it coming into effect in Melbourne. My idea to document the months living a life mostly indoors came from the simple idea of photographing the mundane, capturing day to day moments of life.

Reflecting on the 7 months of living in my old childhood room, the season of winter was most memorable of this time. Cold mornings and rays of warm light cast into the bedroom were thoughts that immediately came to mind.

Yuying - Side Streets of Fitzroy

Evan Mery August 12, 2020

For this blog entry I’m going to keep the words to a minimum and let the pictures speak for themselves. Following from my last entry, Yuying and I spent a considerable amount of time on the playing with high shutter speed on the carpark rooftop. As usual during Melbourne Autumn/Winter seasons, usable light tends to slip away quickly, so for the last part of the shoot we quickly decided on a location change.

Melbourne was beginning to emerge from it’s first lockdown, making the surrounding streets fairly empty and perfect for some unplanned photography. Reflecting on the last part of the shoot, and knowing I’ve improved with regards to my direction., there are a few approaches I would’ve changed for the better. Being later in the day and minus strong directional light, my work would’ve benefited greatly from the speedlite as a few shots feel a bit flat.

I’m crossing my fingers this Stage 4 lockdown isn’t extended any more than it’s initial 6 weeks. The prospect of rummaging through the dusty corners of my harddrive for pics to edit, rather than organising shoots is becoming a likely reality.

Yuying - From Isolation to Fitzroy

Evan Mery July 9, 2020

Way back in May the future looked a lot more bright for Melbourne as it does now. Coming out of a long stint of isolation, this was my first self-directed shoot in what felt like a lifetime. I spent a solid month prior photographing indoors, trying my hand with product photography. Despite this, I still felt a bit rusty with regards to shooting human subjects. Unnecessary nerves maybe? That said I picked a location that would be easy to work with, The Fitzroy Mills. It’s a popular with a lot of photoshoots so not the most original location but it offers two big ticks in my books: wide open spaces and minimal background distractions.

PHOTOSHOOT GOAL

A common photography mistake is forgetting how much of a negative impact background distractions can have on your subject. Yes, it’s an obvious factor when you actively think about it, avoiding intersecting lines, a busy background and the balance of symmetry and asymmetry. Being so focused on the subject it’s surprisingly easy to forget about these rules, for me at least. I mean fair enough right? I want to improve this mindset and for the most part I was happy with this approach. Increasing the depth of field, desaturating colour and forcing myself to look beyond the subject before hitting the shutter button.

After warming up on the ground floor with simple portraits, we moved to the rooftop area. I discovered Yuying is actually pretty damn talented with acrobatics / gymnastics and the shoot quickly shifted gears into an exercice in high shutter speed photography. While photographing, Yuying mentioned it’s easy to pull off moves like these. You can be the judge.

EDITING

I wanted to retain the warm colour of the sun while enhancing the shadows and highlights. Convey a mood that resonates with the late afternoon sun. I found black and white to be an ideal alternative for images with too much colour contrast of cool and warm or blotchy skin colour. B&W removes these issues while transforming the image, focusing on the striking highlight and shadow contrasts.

Victoria - Warm Tones for a Humid Day

Evan Mery April 21, 2020

I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking to themselves in this moment in time “I really should have taken up on those outdoor social activity opportunities”. As the reality of self-isolation kicks in, I can’t help reflecting earlier this year where I was outside in a location other than my immediate surrounding streets. One of these moments was the photoshoot I did with Victoria way back in January (which honestly feels like a lifetime ago). So time to hear me ramble about learning the intricacies of Photoshop retouching!

Cool Tones, Warm Tones and Creating a Mood

Creating heightened emotion in an image is easier said than done. Throwing Photoshop into this expectation is like adding a few more balls to juggle. No stress! Easy right? Chances are you’ve probably come across Instagram posts that use this look. A look that evokes warmth, aged, and nostalgia through desaturated colours. Your phone most likely has this handy filter built in!

Above: Inspirational visual style

Some may consider this visual style overused, but I love it when posts use this in moderation for a visual ‘punch’. It’s understated but injects personality. For a while, I’ve been keen to learn the behind the scenes of these editing techniques. But like every new learning experience in Photoshop the brain is overwhelmed with what steps to take, in what order and usually ending with spitting the dummy in some form or another

The Process

First Step: Desaturating select areas (mostly greens, blues and some yellows) I moved onto slightly adjusting the S curve to bring in that shadow / highlighted dramatic look. I then move onto retouching skin tones to make the subject blend in comfortably with the scenery.

Second Step: GRADIENT FILTERS are used to bring that stylised look, and adding COLOUR BALANCE adjustments for additional contrast in highlights and shadows. At this stage of the process I’m fairly happy with how everything looks, it’s slightly resembling that IG visual style. However, this is the part where I jump into the bottomless pit I like to refer to as BLENDING MODES.

Third Step: Blending Mode’s potential to create is HUGE. Unfortunately, I’ve already droned on too long so I won’t drag this post out any more with the 4+ paragraphs needed to go through every Blending Mode option. In short, Blending Mode can dramatically change the look of an image beyond just colour. The images I’ve posted used a couple or so types of blending modes (Soft Light and Screen) with gradient filters (that adds the noticeable warm look)

I suppose this is where my confidence drops off, yet moving forward I’d love to know what blending modes are ideal to create certain moods or tones. I’ll probably make another post in the future where I play around with blending modes or try to achieve a certain visual style. For the moment though, I’m fairly happy with how these images turned out.

Victoria’s IG @victorialiu1870

Victoria - Dusting Off The Photoshop Cobwebs

Evan Mery January 27, 2020

When you have that desire to do a photoshoot, what’s the inspiration that started it all?

A location, lifestyle, or maybe a just a single colour? As a photographer I sometimes feel overwhelmed with ideas, and it’s difficult to nail down that concept that will begin the creative process. For this shoot, I wanted to expand my Photoshop knowledge. Of course initially there were a lot of ideas swimming around my head. On top of all that, this was the first photoshoot I had done in months so dusting off those ‘creative cobwebs’ so to speak added to my overall creative goal.

My Goal: Work more efficiently with directing the model as well as editing techniques in Photoshop, as I often find myself going back to the same editing tools. This time around I wanted to jump outside of my comfort zone and learn new tools I’ve been too unsure to use in the past. Specifically with regards to colour correction and adjustments in the highlights, shadows and midtones.

Approaching photoshoot I wanted to keep things simple. Utilizing visual lines for the single point perspective at the Shrine of Remembrance, and the vibrant colours at the Botanical Gardens. Keep the focus of the shoot down to a handful of guidelines so compositing the images in the camera doesn’t get complicated.

On the editing front, after I had retouched, smoothed out and colour corrected the skin, I saw Levels as an ideal starting point. A tool I rarely used in the past beyond the S curve, I soon discovered it’s vast potential in making detailed changes to the RGB mix. For more subtle alterations in temperature, I gave Colour Balance a shot. I usually colour balance is used in small amounts, but this time around I made changes in highlights and shadows. Colour Lookup provided me with an array of stylised filters I was previously unaware of (Photoshop already has a MAMMOTH library of colour filters for anyone to experiment with) that added the final touch to many of the images.

As I was working through the images I found COLOUR to be the focus of my editing, and I slowly but surely became more comfortable with using these new features. Adjusting the warmth / coolness to evoke a certain mood can very well be a creative starting point for a photoshoot. ! I still have a whole lot more to learn about Photoshop and it’s functions, but I feel quite content with making that jump into the deep end of the “pool-of-creativity”