"Under The Influence of Calob Castellon"- By Emily Furr

   

(Disclaimer I Screenshoted these photos from his Intagram: @calop_)

I chose Calob Castellon, he is a Los Angeles based photographer and digital composition artist. His work mainly focuses on cosplayers and making their imaginary world come to life. He uses his digital compositing and photography skills to create these hyper realistic fantasies of humans having powers or making something mundane like a video game appear in the air. He does this by adding lights, glowing pieces, taking out things in the scene or adding things to make the photograph more interesting or dynamic. The glowing element is seem in almost every composition, it is his cohesive element that really makes everything stand out and yet still fit together in a portfolio.

Castellon uses depth of field to his advantage, his main subject is in the foreground performing and action while the background is slightly out of focus. Its out of focus enough to not be distracting but still supplement the foreground. He tends to use warm lights for all of his elements, even colors like blue which are usually colder even have a warmer glow to them.  He paints with light in his photos where he is going to impose the unrealistic aspect. Like with the video gamer he has used a green LED light on the subjects face so as to make it seem that there is an actual green diamond there. His compositions do well with following the golden ratio, your eye naturally follows the work all around, there isn’t an information overload.

        Castellon does well in photoshop to composite the different light sources together to get the correct glowing effect. He does well with bringing in the supplemental aspects like the glowing orb, the green diamonds and the blue portal. His use of multiple images with and without his subject allows him to composite bits and pieces of a person in and out of the frame to accomplish the portal look of the third photo. 

Castellon likes to bring the imagination of comic books, video games, movies and more to life, making it pretty realistic. He creates a scene based on what has happened in the material he is sourcing. He is able to give cosplayers a portrait and make them feel like they they are actually apart of that world that they wish was real. Like the last photo, he is referencing Danny Phantom, a TV Show that was on Nikelodeon when I was a kid. His reference material is spot on in this photograph, he has created this from LED lighting, time of day, painstaking work to have Anubace stand in the same spot in two different outfits, and created a blue halo out of his own material. 

I liked Castellon’s use of light and making the imagination of it all come to life. I would like to extend these core ideas into my wn work. I would like to do this with some of the books and movies I am into. I have LEDs, my own camera, a tripod, potential models and a few ideas to work with at the moment. My skills are no where near what Castellon’s is, as this class is my first time doing anything remotely close to this kind of work. I am used to doing light editing work on my photographs, so all of this is still pretty new to me, but its exciting. I hope that I can do influencer justice with my own photographic compositions.