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Old 03-09-2005, 12:17 PM #6
Luke Ellison
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What kind of tools and such do you incorporate into your photography?

I use to have a Nikon Coolpix 990 until it went kaput (too many beach and sand dune photo shoots), so now I stuck with my trusty Pentax SLR. I have an 8mm fish-eye for my dead Nikon, so I'd like to find another camera with the same filter threading.

I have various strobe lights but mostly use hot lamps for lighting since you can see where the light hits and you have better control over shadows.

I JUST finished building a 4 foot wide blue screen table in the basement and I bought actually blue screen background paper from the camera shop.

Do you create actual effects in the real world? Or maybe Photoshop is your forte?

Both. I'm totally for as natural of a shot as you can get. Even the best Photoshop work can still be spotted. I like to use digital effects only for a last resort or if it's totally insane situation in the dio.

Do you consider yourself an amateur (maybe semi-pro or pro) photographer or do you only pick up the camera to create your Dio-stories?

Well, I believe a "Pro" is anyone who makes 40% or more of their yearly income from a field, so yeah I guess I'm a "Pro" since I take pictures of jewelry for wholesalers (with the occassional wedding shoot, blech). I use to do the whole art gallery thing but I got fudged over a couple years ago with taxes, so I cut back on that. Check out HELL, MICHIGAN in comic stores this June for photo cover I took as well.

What's the strangest (or Hardest) thing you've ever done to capture a perfect shot?

For the shot of the Electric Eels in the water, I went to a local botanical garden and took off my shoes and stood in this little man-made stream so I could get real close to the figures. Lots of people stopped to watch and I got asked half a dozen times if I was working on a catalog or something.

For one of the Zartans in the swamp photos, I was in an actual swamp which was knee deep mud and slime... lets just say I "thought" the mud looked more solid than it was... hence how I found out it was knee-deep.
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