Fantastic Blognanza!

Series installment roll call! Part 1! Part 2! Part 3! Part 4! Part 5! Part 6! Haven’t read ‘em? You might want to! Since, you know, this is a series an’ all.

Note: if you want to skip my explanatory ramblings and get straight to the pictures, head on down to the bottom of the post (past the cut) for a veritable bonanza of photographs.

First, an Explanation

Okay, I have to admit something to you guys: by this point in the shirt birthing process, the shirts have already technically been birthed. Assuming the printers have done their jobs, the shirts should be… well, printed. Ergo, they have been birthed, right? So why are we still doing these ‘Birth of a T-Shirt’ posts?

Why, because there’s the ever-important final task of getting the newborn shirts from us to you, of course! And we can’t very well put our shirts up for sale unless we have some good pictures of them to show to prospective buyers, now can we? That would be madness! And not the good kind of madness, either. The bad kind. The very bad kind. So, to take an already-overworked analogy and snap it in two, think of this part of the process as getting the shirts to take their first few steps. Or something like that.

The Photo Shoot

Since we didn’t really have immediate access to an indoor studio or anything like that, we decided to conduct our photoshoot at nearby Gilson Park. It’s a pleasant beachside park in our hometown of Wilmette situated on the shores of beautiful Lake Michigan, with plenty of good spots to take photos. In fact, it’s where we took the product shots for our first line of shirts and where we had that piñata festival that was featured on the rotating image gallery on the front page of our old store.

The best time to take pictures is probably early morning or late afternoon—this way, you can avoid the bad shadows that get cast when the sun is directly overhead. We went with a morning photo shoot, hoping that the diffuse morning light would make for easier exposures.

Difficulties

We had two cameras—Joe’s and mine—and we used Joe’s almost exclusively for roughly the first half of the shoot. Big mistake. Upon returning from the shoot, we discovered that all those pictures were practically unusable!

Why? Well, it turns out that Joe’s camera had been set to take pictures at a resolution of only 640×480 pixels, which meant that the photos we took with it were too small and blurry for us to use. As a result, we had to toss out practically every picture of one of the models, our good friend Elyse. And that’s a cryin’ shame. Sorry, Elyse!

Fortunately, we used my camera for the second half of the shoot, so we still got plenty of good pictures of the other models—that’d be the three of us and Becca, another friend of the Bonanziers.

What’s the lesson here? If you’re taking photos, and you have more than one camera, use both of them! The whole time! You’ll be glad you had those backups and supplemental photos. Also, check and double-check the settings on your camera. Use the highest-quality settings you can. It might take up more memory, but remember—there’s no point in being able to take a whole ton of pictures if none of them are any good. Even though web resolution is 72dpi, you’ll find that you’ll be taking advantage of as much resolution on your photos you can, so the bigger, the better!

Ooh… Lookit the Purdy Pictures!

Okay, enough of my yakking. The rest of this post will primarily be photos, interspersed with a little commentary on my part. When you see a thumbnail image, click on it for a bigger photo.

Although we lost most of the photos from the first part of the shoot, here are a few behind-the-scenes pics I snapped with my own camera.

Elyse is in the first two pictures. There was also a group of young’uns having some kind of summer school class in the amphitheater while we were photo shootin’—you can see ‘em in the third picture.

For our Conezor Attacks! shirt we tried to get a picture of John looming over the camera. We didn’t end up using any of the shots (we couldn’t get the lighting or the draping of the shirt right), but they’re still pretty entertaining:

Strangely enough, nothing enrages John moreso than sea otters. “If they’re so great,” he says, “then why are they going extinct?” ‘Why’ indeed, John. ‘Why’ indeed.

Another idea we ended up scrapping was to use Gilson Park’s beach to evoke the final scene of Planet of the Apes (you know, where Taylor discovers the horrible truth of what planet he’s really on). We all agreed that, while it would definitely be a good shot to use if we ever decided to retake the Handshake Unnatural product pics, it didn’t really make sense to use with Octotree.

You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!

Yet another series of pics we didn’t use was of me wearing the Octotree shirt, standing next to—get this—a tree! I know, brilliant, right? Unfortunately, none of those pictures turned out terribly good. I guess I’m just not that photogenic. Still, here’s the pick of that litter:

I was unaware at the time that the ‘lumberjack pose’ had gone out of style.

Nowadays, digital cameras make the actual picture-taking pretty simple. So really, the trickiest parts of the photo shoot was figuring out stuff for the models to do besides awkwardly standing in front of the camera. That stereotype of the fashion photographer who shrieks surreal commands at his models seems pretty ridiculous (”Act like you’re a lioness stalking her prey! Great! Okay, now you’re a llama, hauling goods through the Andes mountains!”), but it actually kinda-sorta makes sense. I mean, you’ve got to give your models something to do, even if it’s a bit silly. Like this:

Or better yet, this:

Because even though your model might wonder what the heck you’re thinking…

…it leads to some really good shots:

Near the end of the shoot, we wanted to get a good shot of the three of us together for our ‘About Us’ page.

Erm… I said good, not terrifying.

Anyway, this time our goal was to capture the three of us mid-jump. This proved to be somewhat difficult.

Attempt 1: crouched for success!

Once Becca figured out the timing on the camera, we stopped getting pictures of just us crouching. A step in the right direction!

Our timing is slightly worse than the dancers in the Thriller video.

However, we kept encountering problems. Maybe the shot would be blurry…

I’m the fuzzy pinkish blob in the middle.

…or maybe one of us would be partially obscured…

I blame John for getting in the way of my hand. His fault.

…or maybe one of us would just end up looking a little… weird.

But eventually…

…

What? Hey, I’ve got to leave something as a surprise for you guys! Stay tuned, and you might just find out if we ever got that shot.

That’s all for this installment of Birth of a T-Shirt. Hope you all enjoyed the pictures! We definitely had a blast taking them. And keep your eyes peeled for the final installment, Setting Up Shop!