When Weather Won’t Cooperate.

Through rain, clouds, wind, and more rain, professionals stick it out and get it done. This shot for Ply Gem in Virginia happened to be photographed on a rainy day. We managed to sneak in a few angles between the showers, but there was quite a lot to do on the retouching end because of that. In order to make this image look like it was shot on a bright and sunny day, a sky had to be dropped in (obviously). That was a bit of a challenge because of all the leaves overlapping the sky. The color temperature needed to be shifted, the windows had to be colorized, the grass had to be replaced, a new driveway was dropped in, the tree on the left had to be lightened up considerably, and handles on the garage doors were comped in as well. There was a total of about 6-7 hours of retouching in this one shot alone. There are times when mother nature just doesn’t let you get what you want in camera. 

Credits:

Photographer: Alistair Tutton

Assistant: Adam Caselman

Retoucher: Adam Caselman

Author: Adam Caselman

Client: Ply Gem

Client: Blacktop Creative

Cabin in the Woods…not that cabin.

We photograph a lot of very unique buildings - but this one was a little different; a stunning lakeside log cabin. We originally photographed the exterior for Ply Gem’s marketing materials and had a really fun time - we were then approached by the contractor and a magazine to photograph the full interior and off we went again. This time we worked with the fabulous Glenda Bailey and the home owner on some beautiful styling and created some really lovely images - a huge thanks to the home owner (you know who you are!) for making all of this happen.

Credits: PlyGem, Glenda Bailey - Stylist, Adam Caselman - Assistant

winner of the 2012 pdn photography award

Ever since I started my journey into photography I’ve been an avid reader of PDN. For me it’s the primary source of news and advice for almost all aspects of the commercial photography industry - ranging from advertising photography, to photojournalism, to fine art and wedding photography and pretty much every thing in between. It’s read by a lot of photographers and a lot of art buyers. The magazine runs a few specialized competitions - chief amongst them the “Photo Annual”, their annual photography competition. It’s a pretty big deal, from what I know.

So we did the usual thing of entering a couple of pieces (I think we entered last year as well) and you know what’s really weird and unexpected and quite wonderful? We actually won - we’re amongst the winners! We’re actually going to be published in PDN. That’s right, the magazine I love is going to actually feature a photo of mine. Yep, it’s in the June issue, out any day now (the on-line version is out and apparently it’s page 77 if you want to take a look). And having had a brief look through the on-line work the other images are absolutely breathtaking; and it’s an absolute honour (British spelling of course - we’ll talk about aluminium next) to be amongst folk like that.

I’m kinda shocked, I have been for a couple of months since we heard. We’ve been holding off on chatting about it until we saw it on the on-line version. And we got an email the other day saying we can feature the fancy graphic below and I get to go to a party in Manhattan - the fancy one - to meet the other winners - this is kinda cool.

Needless to say I’m “chuffed to bits” and pretty humbled to get this sort of recognition. I know that Kansas City’s had a lot of attention from PDN over the years - David Morris was featured for his really cool blackboard image this year. Austin Walsh had that wonderful Christmas video in there last year and, most ironically, The Wade Brothers are on the facing page to me this year - congrats lads. I’m sure they are others as well but this, for me, is pretty darn amazing!

So what did we win for? It was a really cool project that we worked on with Blacktop Creative and Ply Gem. We’ve done several projects for them over the years documenting their exterior home products. For this project they teamed with Extreme Home Makeover and donated all the exterior finish products for all seven of the homes they built in seven days for their Joplin Christmas Special. It was an incredible donation by them and a pretty emotional project to work on. The homes were incredibly unique and we were charged with capturing overalls and individual details of each home. Over the course of several days we worked on all the different aspects that Ply Gem had delivered. We had, honestly, some bloody awful weather. That meant we were on location for long periods, up well before the dawn, trying to get that perfect moment and we definitely found some gorgeous images of the homes. One angle we settled on immediately was a front elevation shot with a really dominent portion of sky in each image to make a set where the unique designs would hang together as a set. For this series we had a really short gap of good weather, and we literally ran down the street to get each image in as nearly identical lighting as we could get.

Thanks to everyone for all their hard work on the project - it was a really fun set to be on and the co-operation with the film crew was wonderful. The final result had some real meaning for a wonderful group of families.

Credits: Ply Gem, Blacktop Creative, Dave Swearingen - Creative Director, Adam Caselman - Assistant