Photography — Nikki Conero

When I first walked into this small bookstore in Nyack, NY I was a bit overwhelmed. There were books stacked everywhere! The biggest thing I struggle with is finding interesting subjects. I feel like anyone can take a technically “good” photo, but it’s much harder to do that while finding something that an audience will want to view. I knew there was potential to get some great shots in this store. Overall, I came away with this one photo. But I LOVE this photo. I knew the second after I took it that I would be spending a lot of time in Lightroom trying to get the edit perfect.

This I felt was the first time I went in with a vision of what I wanted and was able to execute on that. I knew I wanted a lighter, more 35mm film look. And I wanted to colors to feel a bit older too, think 70s interior design colors. Contrary to the older look I wanted to achieve, I also knew I didn’t want the whites of the books to appear yellow. I felt that would push the idea that this was a photo of something old, where I wanted it to feel like this is something old, but when it was new. If that makes any sense!

Before and after below. Also I want to say, shooting in RAW is a lifesaver and Lightroom denoise is fantastic.

Hey y’all! First time writing out a blog post, even though I’m 100% from the time frame of when every single person had their own blog (I’m looking at you blogspot).

I wanted to take this time to talk about my experience throughout the years as an artist and walkthrough my workflow for creating the final product on what I’m calling the “Old Car” photo.

I’m a VFX artist in my everyday life. I comp for TV shows mainly, but the occasional movie as well. I’m finding when I take a photo that I like, I can’t help but to want to make it perfect. Maybe that’s bad, maybe that’s good. I don’t really know.

When I originally took the photo of this car, I thought the subject was great! Trying to find an interesting subject is my biggest struggle with street photography. So I knew from the start I was going to like this photo. I didn’t realize until I got back home that there was a much newer, modern, car in the background…

I felt that it was a bit distracting from the older car, which is where I wanted the viewer’s focus to go to. In comp, if there is an on set VFX supe, there will also hopefully be a lot of set photos for the comp artist to use. In this case I didn’t have an image of those particular buildings in the back, or really any buildings straight on at all. I could have sourced one, either buying or going out again to shoot those buildings, but I felt like that was a lot of work and I honestly didn’t want to wait another day. I decided to give the Generative Fill in Photoshop a go and it worked great! I had to stencil some stuff back in, but overall I was impressed with the outcome.

I used the Generative Fill one more time on the screen right of the car to get rid of the plastic bag. The rest of the time I was using the Healing Brush tool. Mostly to remove the other garbage and white dots on the ground that I thought were a bit too distracting.

I also knew I wanted this image to feel a bit warm. It was sunset at the time, but in NYC that doesn’t always mean the light gets to street level. I added some warm tones to the brights of the image to help push that idea. I also darkened almost everything around the car, expect for where the light was coming in on the screen left. The final touch was adding some yellow to the headlights. I originally thought it might be cool to have them on and glowing, but I realized that might look unnatural so I opted not to.

Overall I’m pretty happy with how this photo came out! It was the first time it quite a while I came in with a vision and was able to execute what I wanted. This has given me a lot of confidence and I can’t wait to keep going on this journey.