Watch This Space

"I'd just always wanted a space suit," says New York photographer Phillip Toledano, explaining why, not too long ago, he purchased a vintage Soviet cosmonaut's suit from a seller in Poland. "It was simply a peculiar childhood fixation of mine." Both to celebrate the fulfillment of his youthful ambitions and to provide City magazine with a nifty layout on travel fashion, Toledano designed a photo shoot around his purchase. "The magazine had already spoken to me about the idea of doing a layout on travel accessories, so it seemed natural to use the suit and give the layout a future travel theme."

Toledano then turned to Julie Pochron, owner of Pochron Studios in Brooklyn, and retoucher Joey Moon to bring the final images to life. Pochron met Moon when he was working as an intern for David LaChapelle, one of Pochron's printing clients, and eventually hired him as a retoucher when she decided to begin offering full digital services three years ago.

For this assignment, Moon and Pochron completed a total of five images for Toledano. "It started off with an e-mail from Phil," says Pochron. "He wrote, 'I'm thinking about astronauts and flying bathing suits. Call me.'"

Moon and Pochron had previously worked with Toledano on a number of projects and were very familiar with the photographer's style and preferences. "Phil shoots medium-format, square images that we know we'll have to turn into rectangular magazine-format images," says Moon. "But we've gotten to a point with him where, for example with the backgrounds we build for the pictures, we know what he wants those to look like, so he doesn't have to keep checking up on the job every two hours."

Moon and Toledano had agreed early on that the pictures for the City layout needed to be shot in pieces rather than as single images, partly because the bottom part of the suit was too small for the model?an older man with a deadpan, Buster-Keaton-ish face. The picture of the space vacationer trying to grab several floating food pills was, in fact, the only image in which the model actually wore part of the suit. Moon said a separate, un-helmeted shot of his face still had to be dropped in because the visor in the original picture had obscured it. For the other shots, Toledano stuffed the suit with newspaper and suspended it from grip stands.

For the food pill shot, Moon first masked out the figure using Photoshop's masking function, then dropped out the original background and built a new one. To create the mask, Moon used a very small brush setting, which gave a softer edge than the path tool would have. "Keeping the edge soft and feathered like that gives something more like what you'd normally find in a photograph, where something curved is going to have a soft edge as the depth of field falls off and the edge becomes blurred."

Moon next cut the traveler's face out of another shot and dropped it into the helmet. "I had to re-size and scale the face a little bit, then I erased some of the edges and burned them down so it would look like there was some falloff into the helmet and like it had some depth." In the original shot, the visor was also heavily scratched and covered with fingerprints. "So I took the visor out," says Moon, "and built a kind of a haze over the front of the face, to mimic what a face behind a visor would look like."

The concept for this series of shots was to de-saturate the color in the spacesuit and background, then to make the accessories the space traveler was carrying, such as a pair of swim trunks or an American flag hanging out of a suitcase, super-saturated, almost day-glo in hue. For this shot, the food pills provided the color. "The pills were Skittles or something like that suspended on monofilament," Moon says. "I pulled out the ones I thought were the best, cloned one or two if I needed them, tweaked them for perspective and size, added the color and then put in the text."

Moon kept all these separate elements on individual layers and roughed-in the color, and then it was Pochron's turn to draw on her long experience as a printer and do the final color correction. "I sent Phil JPEGs of what we'd done and called him up before doing the final work, just to confer and make sure we were all on the same page. I did some additional desaturation with the sponge tool on the suit and on the face, and then I used the same tool to amp-up the pills. I also brought up the blue ring on the collar and the sleeve." They went back and forth a little bit more, and made a few more minor corrections before Toledano finally said it was a go. The image was then proofed using the studio's Lambda printer and the files were shipped to the magazine along with the Lambda match print.

We have lift off.



Pochron Studios

20 Jay Street, Suite 1100

Brooklyn, NY 11201

Phone: (718) 237-1332

Fax: (718) 237-1328

Web: www.pochronstudios.com



Principal Contact: Julie Pochron E-mail: Julie@pochronstudios.com



Equipment: Pochron Studios uses dual processor Macintosh G-5s with 4 gb of RAM, Lacie monitors and Wacom pen tablets. Scanning is done using a Heidelberg drum scanner, proofing on the studio's Lambda digital printer.



Sample Clients: The client list of Pochron Studios includes the following commercial and fine-art photographers:



Dash Snow, Gage & Betterton, Hanna Linden, Roger Ricco, Ryan McGinley, Phil Toledano, Marc Joseph, Justine Cooper and the Janet Borden Gallery.