Meet Matthew Baldwin

Matthew Baldwin, a well-known New York-based photo-retoucher, has left Gotham to start a new life in Austin, Texas. We ask Matthew how he discovered modo.

Tell us about your background please.

After getting a liberal arts degree I moved to New York City to get an MFA in painting at the Pratt Institute. Huge paintings and even bigger school debts. This was a big turning point for me, graduating twenty years ago into an economic recession and staring down the barrel of poverty and no practical skills.

Pants-wetting fear gave me the incentive for bluffing my way into Pratt’s nascent computer graphics lab and learning digital apps, hoping to build some marketable job skills. Once I discovered the digital paint programs I was hooked: here were these seductive tools that allowed you to create art luminous and wonderfully flexible. The conundrum was that it was stuck in a monitor. Now what to do with it? I’ve been trying to figure that out for the last two decades. I suppose one answer is to create things for moving graphics and animation, and let film and video be your medium. But I’m a still image guy at heart: rather than tell narratives over a length of minutes, I love filling a single frame up with a ponderous sense of time.

Into the West by Matthew Baldwin. Giclée print on paper. 42" x 27"

I think the first image you posted on the modo Forum was the evocative Bison shot.  What was the inspiration for this image?

That was a year and a half ago and we’d just moved to Austin, Texas. I was back in the middle of the country, because I grew up in the woods, hills and farmland of rural Minnesota. 20 years of dense NYC urbanism really makes the contrasts pop. I was thinking about living in horizontal landscapes again, the frontier prairie, layers of cultural history here and where they’ve gone, the spread of suburban development.

At the same time I was playing around with 3D objects. Someone online had done an instance test with a cow mesh ( I think it was the old Lightwave model ). They had stuck replicated cows all over a bigger cow. It was just a five minute experiment, but was kinda cool. It reminded me of the cosmological myth of the giant turtle with the world on its back.

Putting both these inspirations together, it felt natural to construct this bison-as-world-to-Native-Americans thing.  Someone on the Luxology Forums had mentioned the final piece was an elegy. I like that notion, the feeling of something passing away. It’s not accident that the bison/cart is slipping off the backdrop, pointed east instead of west.

I was also paying homage to all the Victorian photo portraits of Native Americans. But by working within this photographic style, I found a way of finishing 3D renders that I really like: less pristine digital and more fuzzy analog.

Process board for Bison project

What techniques did you use for the bison? 

The technique was running start-to-finish without getting distracted, sort of skimming the surface of modo! Seriously, I must have a thing for glowing lights and technology – I’ve been perpetually seduced by 3D modeling for the last ten years. I’ve tinkered and puttered and fiddled with thousands of dialog buttons and tools. Like Rip Van Winkle, I woke up and looked back dismayed by the lack of finished pieces. I made a promise to myself: more art, less Winkle.

So the trick with this piece was to simplify. Keep the geometry low and rough so I could play with it quickly in modo. Move cameras and lights around quickly. Cut the chroma down so I didn’t have to sweat assigning appropriate colors to everything (this also had the happy side-effect of amplifying the emotion of the piece). Ditch render-intensive materials and camera effects so I could generate high-res renders quickly. Take advantage of modo’s many render output types. I could do a lot with a final color render, and ambient occlusion render, and a surface ID render to grab masks from. Then throw it all into Photoshop and work out a comp of the final that felt balanced and had the emotion I wanted. Once I had that emotional target to hold on to, I went back to modo and added the modeling detail. But it was great having locked down the camera position and lighting early.

You have used term “plausible surrealism.” Please elaborate.

To me it’s about how much you want the viewer to suspend their disbelief. I love how utterly believable you can make objects in 3D. I like the realness but also want to tell stories, so I’m aiming somewhere between product render and fish-riding-bicycle. Too close to the fantastical and it starts becoming illustration. On the other hand, unless you painstakingly sweat every surface parameter on a straight product render, it winds up looking wrong.

Life Science by Matthew Baldwin. Giclée print on paper. 60" x 24"

I like the feeling that in some photo studio somewhere an artist has built these objects and assemblies. Having the camera pull back and reveal the studio allow the imperfections of the process work for you rather than against you – the roughness of the model can be explained as the limitations of the person building the props, not as a mistake in the final render. It also humanizes the output and puts a little life into the piece. It allows me to alter a shape or omit something if it strengthens final image, not worrying about total verisimilitude.

Ultimately, I hope it makes a viewer buy into the believability, the realness of the piece.

Your images have a kind of historical feel to them. For The Long Voyage, was this inspired by an actual ship?

I have a picture of a 50’s cruise ship hanging on our wall, the Santa Rosa from Grace Line. I love the shot. It beckons you to escape like all good travel art does.

I also remember stumbling into an antique store in Duluth Minnesota when I was 14. Duluth is a harbor city on the Great Lakes, and some old sailor had welded a 6-foot steel replica of a freighter in his spare time. It was crude and sloppy, detailed and awesome all at the same time. He was near-fanatical modeling every hatch, cabin, ballast tank, light and rudder. I understand the impulse, and thought of the dude as I was assembling my own sea-faring vessel.

Hopefully you get a sense of longing looking at the piece, but also get that itchy adolescent vibe of building a cool Revell model and then setting it on fire with a M-80.

Can you explain how you created The Long Voyage image in a bit more detail please?

The process is similar to that of the bison piece, where finalizing lighting and composition FIRST (using rough geometry) is crucial. My work starts in modo, but much of the compositing is done in Photoshop using multi-render pass techniques.

Since I’m purposely simplifying color schemes down to something more monochromatic, the shapes need to read very quickly. I’ll add a layer in the shader tree for a diffuse amount trick using incidence angle. I’ll apply this globally to everything in order to get lights and darks to show up across the smokestacks or define where the corners of ships are. It’s reminds me of the chrome mario in the N64 days – I’m trying to deploy it a little more subtly, of course!

The Long Voyage by Matthew Baldwin. Giclée print on paper. 42" x 27.8"

There was a time effect I was hoping for, to have the cruise ship chase the setting sun westward, and find a way to have both day and night depicted in the piece. Rather than totally solve this with lighting in modo, I created a “day” version of the ship and a “night” one, then composited them together in Photoshop. Flicking lights on was achieved simply by grabbing the surface ID for the windows and using a mask to illuminate the lights towards the stern.

There’s been an effort to create atmosphere in all the work from this series. One drawback of a straight 3D render is that it lacks any hints of the alchemy going on in traditional photography, or the meaty materiality of traditional painting. Lens blooms and artifacts, exposure, grain, ghosting, remind a viewer of the liquid quality of light.

Without bloom (upper image) and with bloom (lower image)

One way I like to add a little viscera into the final look is to dupe a layer of the final image in Photoshop, blur it, and set the above image to “overlay.” I usually then mask off the highlights and darks to control the effect. The result is an image whose lights and darks pool. It’s also a great way to emphasize broader tonal areas, downplaying the chatter of finer detail.

I’ve also included a zipped up Photoshop action file (ZIP file) illustrating this technique for other modo users to download and experiment with.

Please tell us about your latest work for Ruth’s Steakhouse. 

This was for a spring ad campaign. Ruth’s Chris is a great steakhouse with a storied history originating from New Orleans. Unfortunately much of their visual history was destroyed when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf in 2005. Most of the vintage shots of Ruth Fertel’s original restaurant were only left as low-res digital scans a few pixels across. The assignment was to respectfully recreate the original street view to use for print ads, web images and menu covers.

Lost in Katrina, the original photo of Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse has been reproduced using modo

How do you go about prospecting for clients – or do they come to you from existing customer recommendations?

I do both commercial work and fine art work. With the commercial work, I’ve run a retouching and illustration business for the last 20 years. Most of my leads come from the ad agencies and creatives I’ve known. Basically networking and word-of-mouth. That work has been traditionally Photoshop, but more of it lately involves 3D, which is a nice change.

Then there’s the personal work I do, where modo and Photoshop are constantly being used together. This stuff is the rewarding work – where I’m the client and I don’t have to stop working at a piece until I’m satisfied. I sell these as giclée prints through galleries.

Goldberg Variation by Matthew Baldwin. Giclée print on paper. 42" x 26"

Why do you use modo?

I got infected by 3D using Lightwave, and when Alan, Stewart and Brad made the jump to modo, I went along for the ride, starting with version 101.

I love modo. The user interface is very well thought out. The Sub-D modeling tools are the best I’ve come across. And I love how the camera and surface parameters are tuned so that you can fire up a render and generate excellent results without a lot of fiddling at controls. Every release has made the process of making images easier. And while 3D itself could never be confused with simplicity, I’m looking forward to what’s they’ve got coming next.

We thank you for sharing your images and techniques with the modo community.  In particular, your Forum postings have been great.

Thanks to you and Luxology for the great community support. I’m happy to be a part of it!

Thank You!

 

Learn more

Matthew Baldwin’s web site

Matthew Baldwin’s Luxology Forum Threads:

Matthew Baldwin’s Photoshop action file (ZIP file) illustrating his image “bloom” technique.