Bringing the Ocean into the Studio: a Nautical Photoshoot

Here’s a short and sweet photo session, brought to us by photographer Ben Garrett. In this video, he takes us swiftly through a recent shoot he did for Steadfast Creative, a web and mobile design firm sporting a nautical theme. With a few handy techniques and a bit of a mess, he shows how his team recreates the sea in the studio:

When beginning on a concept, it’s easy to have a an image in your mind of what you want the project to look like when it’s finished. The real work of an artist is to figure out how to translate that vision into something achievable. This involves a lot of invention, a lot of experimentation, and the occasional failure. Sometimes we want to convey the barely-possible, and that’s part of why we love the photographic medium; it is a way to make the illusion into the reality. To do this, we come up with all kinds of ways that we can trick the camera—creative lighting, optical illusion, and, as is the case in this video, prop creation—making one thing appear to be another, as Garrett does with his soapy “seawater.”

studio photography

Between these methods, some super high-speed strobes, and a little retouching, the finished product becomes a wonderful execution of constructed reality, and how simple it can be.

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