Nipple Challenge

Do you dare take the nipple challenge?

My nephew is rad. he will do just about anything for money. So while visitng him in Salt Lake City, I convinced him it would be cool to go outside and run around without a shirt on. Not such an easy thing to do when it's 5 degrees outside. But he loved every minute of it.




Thought I would share with the world how I put together my photos. So much of my inspiration comes from browsing the net and searching out other great photographers. Half of the killer photos I have taken, from my Perilous Predicaments, to the maternity shots, to all the other photos of my kids in my private collection, and much of my fine art photography, has been directly inspired by and or directly emulated from other photographers. Mostly from browisng their websites, photo blogs and community photography sites.

So I just want to show people what is possible. How a basic idea, such as wanting to send my baby down a snow covered hill on a sled alone, can come to fruition.

I put little restraints on myself when editing photos. I shoot digital and edit in photoshop, so the possibilities truly are endless. (If I had enoough time in a day, which i don't. (Dam kids.) I am talking about photo editing boundaries. There has been an ongoing debate in the photography community concerning what is considered okay to do, and what is not when editing photos on the computer. And I won't bore you with it, because I don't care about it. But I have basic boundaires for my Perilous photos.

I want to create images that you could believe actually happened. Could my son fall off the top of a 20 foot slide, sure he could. But at barely two years old he certainly could not hold on so I could take a photo, let alone climb back over the edge without falling twenty feet. So I shoot him at the bottom of the slide and simply move him to the top in photoshop. I know it's editied, not real, and I tell people it's not real. I'm okay with that, because when I look at the finished product I laugh. That's why I do it.

Could I fall off the back of a sled with my baby in tow, and she goes careening down the huge hill at 50 mph hitting the bump at the bottom jettisoning her off into orbit. Sure sure. But I would rather keep her around a few more years. So I edit the shit out of half a dozen photos to create that scenario. It could happen. I'm sure it has happened. And I want you to feel the fear a parent should when seeing an image of it taking place. The only safe way to do that, is to edit the photos.

Could my baby fall out of a jet plane. Yeah. My brother flys and takes me flying, and I know how easy it is to just open the door and jump out while going 200 mph 20,000 feet up. But it wouldn't happen. Could she fall off a building. Sure. But not very likey. See, I could edit photos and make her falling out of orbit, I could put her in virtually any conceivable place. But why. I only want to create images which we know, as parents, could possibly happen. Okay sometimes I clearly go over that boundary, but I try to sticky pretty close to it. No, my baby can't crawl up onto a stove, but yes our young kids can and do burn themselves on a stove. Anway, you get my point. And my editing limits.

My new sledding Predicament consists of 5 photos put together. One of me eating a royal snow sammich, one of the baby sitting ina sled, a mountain and tree shot, a ridge line and a simple shot of snow.

Here are just a few of me, eating shit off the sled. My brother shot me.




Yeah I thought you might like those. Here are the other shots I used. They are taken at two different sledding locations, on seperate days.










Where we took the shots of me sledding, at a huge hill at a school, the background was boring. A chainlink fence at the top of the hill and one or two trees, with a crappy gray sky. Not fun to look at. And I didn't want just me the baby and snow. I need something else to spice it up. So I added the trees and mountain from when we went sledding up in the mountains the day before. And started off by merging the two photos like so.






But I needed a good snow ridge...line, snow bank, edge, whatever the hell you want to call it. So I used this photo as the merging point of the two previous photos. Minus the people and trees. And with a good ratation to create the steep hill line.

I know, what the hell? See, that is a real ridge from the edge of a snow covered hill. It's really there, I didn't fabricate it. I could have. But I would never of been able to make it look real. I couldn't have given it the misplaced snowy texture which was needed at the edge. So I took another shot, and simply extracted the snow line and put it in my shot. Making a beautiful shot of a snowy hill, with trees just over and down the hill and a large mountain beyond. Every part of that is real, just rearanged to create a new image. I also made minor adjustments to the color tones and contrasts to make the images work together.





Now I've got me a good canvas to put the sledders on. First I found a good spot for me and the sled I abandended.


To help make these seperate images come together as one, I overlapped them where I could. Such as the small sticks coming out of the snow on the top left corner, overlapping in front of the trees, and my feet prostrated into the air. There use to be snow behind my feet, but not in the new composite. Over the years I have found that the small details, collectivelly makes a heavily edited photo believable. The things which you may not specifcally notice out in front, really do make all the difference.


Then comes baby. Because I mistakingly took the shot of her at a much higher angle, looking down on her more, than the shot my brother took of me eating shit, I couldn't just cut her out of the sled and plop her down into this one. It wouldn't look right. So I cropped off much of her leg and part of her hand, to compensate for the lower vantage point of the shot of me and my sled, plopping her all the way down into this sled. Those sort of details matter the most, and can be easily overlooked. I'm not even going to tell you how many hours I spent on this photo. You would laugh at me. Or cry. (That's just one of the reasons why i don't shoot people for money, I would have to charge several hundred thousand dollars just for one photo shoot if I calculate the editing time into my bill. Phhhhttt.)