houzz.com

We are happy to announce that we are now featured on houzz.com! We are excited and really hope that this will be a great way to stay engaged with our current clients as well as foster new relationships with other professionals and potential clients. Play with the slideshow below and please visit our houzz profile here.

Irvin Serrano Featured on Houzz

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Pepperell Mill Images - Website Update

I think most of us are all proud of where we come from, even if there are bigger, better, more glamorous places. That's certainly true for us. We love it here in Biddeford and we feel fortunate to have our studio in the North Dam Mill, a portion of the Pepperell Mill Campus. It's great to see this city growing and truly coming into its own. It's even better knowing that on some small scale we are having a positive effect on its growth.

The History of this mill and this city are as tightly woven as the cloth that came off its looms. We have really enjoyed capturing some of the more interesting spaces from around the mill. These are each a small time capsule, a frozen moment in that timeline of our history.

"Requiem Project" Website Update

The Requiem Project consists of a series of images using Mozart's Requiem as a source of inspiration. It is an introspective interpretation based on the music and lyrics of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's final piece. Each image corresponds to and is named after a specific movement on the composition. Click here to listen to the complete version in D minor on Youtube.

"Beautiful Faces of Cancer" - Website Update

"Beautiful Faces of Cancer" was a project intended to raise awareness about how life with cancer affects all of us. It is a celebration of those who chose not to be governed by this illness. Whether you or a loved one has been diagnosed. It is true that cancer leaves an indelible mark and changes people's outlook on life in a major way. The "Beautiful Faces of Caner" is a conduit for people to tell their story. It is a  compilation of images and voice recordings of individuals who decided to let the rest of us into their lives. Maybe someday, with their help we'll be better able to understand this disease and what it does to people physically and emotionally.

Photographer Irvin Serrano was the mind behind the "Beautiful Faces of Cancer". It was a project that came to life after a close friend was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Since then, Irvin has been in awe of the great inner strength of the people he has met who have stood up to this relentless disease. The worst can have a way of bringing out the best in some of us.This is what this project was all about, showing through images what the beautiful faces of cancer look like.

Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral - Website Update

In an attempt to streamline the site for better focus & navigation, we have decided to shift our personal work section of our website to our blog. We will be making periodic posts for a few weeks to transition all of those images here. If you have already seen these images we hope you will enjoy seeing them again!

These are images that Irvin created on his last trip to Mexico City. He was fortunate to get some great behind-the-scenes access to this amazing cathedral and its massive pipe organ.

Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral

In-Depth Edit - Camden Harbour Inn

Last year we had the great opportunity to capture some amazing images for our friends at the Camden Harbour Inn, in Camden Maine. Although the images were shot originally for the Inn itself we were pleasantly surprised to see that Maine Home & Design ran a story about the Inn featuring our images in their June 2013 issue.

(click on images to view larger)

That finally gave me the opportunity and motivation to begin posting some "in-depth edits" highlighting the great care and attention to detail that we value so much when it comes to creating images for our clients. This will be the first in a series of posts that I will be presenting regularly to showcase our editing process.

When we capture our photographs, we are very aware of elements within the field of view that could draw your eye away from the intended subject matter. We pride ourselves on finding creative, interesting perspectives that showcase the subject of every photo we take and sometimes that is all it takes to crop out an unwanted element. However we are not always able to eliminate everything we would like from a scene with creative cropping and for those circumstances we rely on our proficiency with Adobe Photoshop. This shot was a great example of just that situation. Below is a before & after image showing the room with and without the air conditioning unit that we removed from the image.

Typically if we know we are going to do a sophisticated edit like this we would shoot the wallpaper straight on to give ourselves an undistorted high-res image to work with. Unfortunately the decision to take out the air conditioning unit was made in post. In this case we had to work with what we had so we were forced to use a section of the existing wallpaper within the scene. (see below)

That selection was then copied and moved upward to cover the air conditioner.

From there we distorted the selection to match the perspective of the wallpaper (no easy task I assure you), then the exposure & color were adjusted to blend in with the existing wallpaper. We completed the edit by cloning out the area where the AC unit overlaps the wall as well as the shadow it creates on the ceiling. Hover your mouse over the image below and you can watch as the air conditioner magically disappears.

( hold your cursor over this image to view the animation, be patient while images load for the first time )

We felt that although the original image may be a more truthful rendition with the air conditioner in place, it could draw your eye away from the aesthetics of the room. It's one of those things that you may not notice while in the environment, but when you capture it in a photograph, it becomes frozen in time and can stand out like a sore thumb. Just like light switches, outlets and thermostats, (which we regularly remove) we accept them as they are for their utility but removing them from an image allows your eye to move smoothly through the scene without getting tripped up on those (generally) inconsequential bits of our everyday lives.

Until the next time,

Mike

  Software used

- Adobe Lightroom 4
- Adobe Photoshop CS 6

As always we appreciate any feedback that you would like to leave in the comments below or likes on our Facebook page.

North Dam Mill Portrait

Our studio has been located in The North Dam Mill for almost four years. We love it here! The Mill used to be a textile mill in its heyday and is located in Biddeford, Maine just about twenty minutes south of Portland. If you walk into the mill today you will see something vastly different from what you would have seen a few decades ago. In its current renaissance many businesses and residential tenants call the mill home and are not only contributing to make the Mill but also Biddeford a better place to be.

To view a higher resolution version of the image click here. Your browser may require you to click on the image once it loads in order to view it larger.

 
Here you will find creative professionals such as sculptors, photographers, book binders, woodworkers, painters and a wide range of businesses that include accounting services, personal trainers, massage therapists, music instrument repair, cafes and restaurants among many more.

We consider many of the people here our friends and decided that we would like to create an image depicting many of those people. A while back I was contacted to shoot an assignment where a group shot was needed for a corporate client of ours. I suggested a couple options on how to go about creating the shot. Our client chose one that worked for them but left me wanting to create the other option. So I decided that this would be a good opportunity to execute my idea including some of the people that work around the mill.

My goal was to craft an image where everyone was shot separately and then combined in post. This way I could show future clients the possibilities. Often we get requests to photograph many people and get into a situation where one or two people cant make it to the shoot. Well, that is no longer an issue if we photograph everyone separately. The other advantage is that by photographing each person individually we got to choose an image in which we thought the person look best.

Technically speaking, the major advantage was that by photographing people individually we had a chance to use the full frame of our camera in just that one person versus utilizing one frame to capture everyone. That translates into more resolution and a larger file size, therefore we would have the ability to create a large print without having to up-res the file. So we ended combining twelve 21MP files instead of having only one 21MP file. For reference, this image could easily be printed on a billboard without having to mess with it.

We are really please about with the final image and cant wait for the opportunity to create something like this for a client. Would love to hear what you think, so please leave us a comment below.

Hyperlite Mountain Gear - Coming Soon!

We recently did a shoot of Mike St. Pierre and Hyperlite Mountain Gear for a feature in an upcoming issue of Down East Magazine. We are really looking forward to seeing the article in print. Interestingly, the project was a true Biddeford collaboration. The story was written by the incomparable Joshua Bodwell, a resident of Biddeford, Maine and both Hyperlite Mountain Gear and Irvin Serrano Photography are located in the North Dam Mill here in Biddeford.

Keep your eye's peeled for the article in June or July issue of Down East Magazine, and if you are in the need of some remarkably light mountain gear, you can check out their gear here.

Istanbul

A couple of years ago my girlfriend Melanie and I made a list of places we would like to visit. Traveling to Mexico was pretty much a given since I try to go there as often as possible to visit family. In our first trip we traveled to Mexico and explored Oaxaca and other places around the city. Melanie is a French and Spanish teacher so we thought that it would be interesting to get us both out of our element and travel to a place where neither of us spoke the language. Turkey made it to the top of our list.

Just last month we were able to begin crossing countries off our list by heading to Istanbul. We only had a little over a week to travel so we decided to stick around Istanbul and not try to see too much in a small amount of time. I am happy to report that I am glad we did that. In my travels I had never gone to a place that had a culture that was completely new to me. The places I have visited in the past have always been similar in culture and I could most likely get around speaking Spanish, English or my limited French.

Istanbul captivated me from the moment I got there, the people, smells, architecture and not long after our arrival, the food. The language sounds awesome. I had heard Turkish spoken in my college years while hanging out with my friend Serdar. Unfortunately, any Turkish he taught me could not be used in regular conversation. After a couple days we were able to start deciphering some of the sounds and begin to make out familiar words.

My plan was not to go too crazy with photo gear so decided to take only one camera body and about five lenses to choose from. Each day I would pick one or two lenses and leave the others behind. That worked out great given that we were walking almost everywhere we went. Took a couple tilt/shift lenses to shoot architecture, a couple of prime lenses and my trusty 24-70mm. There were two things I wanted to primarily shoot, the first one being general shots of the culture and life. Secondly, I wanted to shoot a series of time-lapse videos whenever possible. Here you will see a rough version of one of those time-lapse videos.

It was a great trip and would recommend experiencing Istanbul to anybody. The people are great and for those of you wondering, yes, we felt safe all the time. A friend predicted we would come home with a rug…we did. Those guys selling rugs are good I tell you…good! Car sales people should learn from them. The guy we got our rug from was very nice and genuine when compared to some of the other salesmen we had encountered. A couple of days after we bought the rug he spent some time with us and gave us a lesson in backgammon while drinking tea and puffing on a nargile (hookah). Tried a couple local delicacies out of our comfort zone, drank some Raki and realized in a short period of time that someday we would want to visit Istanbul again. Oh and by the way, I am now addicted to Turkish coffee.