From Photoworkshop.com

Photos to Inspire
Photos to Inspire: Ben Willmore
By Lynne Eodice
Mar 1, 2008

CLICK HERE TO SEE A GALLERY OF BEN WILLMORE'S IMAGES

All images © Ben Willmore

Photoshop instructor and digital photographer extraordinaire Ben Willmore sold his home nearly two years ago to live full-time in a 40-foot touring bus, which also serves as his home office. He has made his name as an instructor who can connect with Photoshop users of every skill level, including those of us who are not technically savvy. And for the past couple of years, he has been focusing on his own special brand of imagery.

When asked what he likes to shoot, he responds, “I don’t actually have a lone favorite. It changes over time.” Willmore says that landscapes, nudes, buildings and a wide variety of subject matter spark his interest. He enjoys shooting subjects that are lit naturally with no light modifiers, “or I go completely in the other direction and do completely unusual and artificial lighting.”

Cadillac Ranch with sparkler light painting


For example, he used sparklers that he purchased at a commercial fireworks stand in California to illuminate his image of cars at Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas. “I pulled up at Cadillac Ranch at around 11 p.m., and parked the bus directly across from the entrance,” he notes. “I took a nap, and woke up around 3 a.m. I set up my tripod, lit the cars using these sparklers, and went back and lit them with flashlights. It’s about 12 shots combined.” Just doing one shot would have resulted in a very grainy photograph, he explains, but by doing one shot for each car he was able to control this noise and combined them in Photoshop. “I probably left my tripod in the same position for four hours,” he says. After the sun came up, he also photographed the automobiles with natural sunlight. “Because the camera never moved, I had the opportunity to stack the versions of those I wanted in Photoshop.”

Ben Willmore and the bus he calls home

Willmore has been developing techniques that he calls “shooting for Photoshop,” which involves changing the way he shoots, knowing he’s going to edit images in Photoshop. “Many people just try to emulate techniques you’d do in the darkroom,” he says. “I’m trying to go beyond that and do things that would be difficult or impossible to do.”

He’s currently working on a book project of scenes from Route 66, which will be his first purely photographic, coffee-table book. Willmore has three books on the market now, all of which are Photoshop-related: Adobe Photoshop Studio Techniques, which describes the logic of Photoshop (“you learn how things really work, and not just what to do”), How to Wow: Photoshop for Photography, (“more of a cookbook, with before-and-after images”), and his third and latest one, Photoshop CS3: Up to Speed, which covers the program’s very latest developments.

To date, Willmore has taught around 85,000 Photoshop users on three continents, and estimates that he makes about 30 appearances per year. “I leave the bus parked wherever I want to shoot next,” he explains. “Then I fly out to most of the events where I speak, because I don’t want to drive just for the sake of getting to an event. I’d rather drive because I actually want to be wherever it is I wind up.”

Antelope Canyon, Northern Arizona

His main project right now is the Route 66 book, but he says he’s trying to talk himself out of shooting in order to spend time processing and organizing his images. When he needs to speak at events, he schedules his flights so that he has extra time. “Ideally I bookend the event with a photo shoot at each end of it,” he says. Prior to the PMA trade show in Las Vegas, he shot the Racetrack at Death Valley, California, and prior to departing Las Vegas, he photographed the Neon Boneyard.

For Willmore’s Route 66 photography, he’s been using a special technique that’s referred to as HDR (High Dynamic Range), in which he takes 3 or more exposures that are bracketed to be progressively brighter, and then they’re combined together. “The HDR part of it is only about 10% of the image,” he says, “it’s like the first 10 minutes of time I spend on an image, but I might wind up spending about eight hours on it.” He also has a DVD available on this technique.

Willmore says that in the past, he’s been best known for his Photoshop teaching, but he’s making a push to become better known for his images. “The main thing for me is that nobody knew me for my photography until about two years ago,” he points out. “I decided to make it one of my primary focuses. That’s when I sold my house and started living on a bus. And that’s when I made it so that wherever I am, I can be shooting in places where I want to be—whereas before that, I would only shoot when I had time, which wasn’t very often.”


To see more of Ben Willmore’s images, visit www.TheBestOfBen.com.
To learn more about Ben and his upcoming events, go to www.DigitalMastery.com.
Visit Ben’s Blog at www.WhereIsBen.com.


Ben’s Gear:

• Canon EOS 5D
• Canon EF 15mm Fisheye, 17–40mm, 28–105mm, and 100–400mm lenses (“I have the 17–40mm lens on the camera 85% of the time.”)
• Lensbaby
• Various flashlights for light painting
• Monopod and Tripod
• ThinkTank belt-based “camera bag”
• Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, and Photomatix software, as well as a few Nik Software filters like Dfine

CLICK HERE TO SEE A GALLERY OF BEN WILLMORE'S IMAGES


© Copyright 2002 by Photoworkshop.com