Do I use special equipment or cameras when taking my photos? No. I actually use cell phone cameras and attempt to find a place in my house with the best lighting possible. There are no magic tricks up my sleeve, only technique, trial and error and an extremely stubborn personality. Where the pictures really start to shine is with the actual editing process. As of recent, the programs I use are the following:
-Canva.com
-Inkscape
-Paint Tool SAI V2
-RNI films (iPhone)
The most lengthy process of editing is cropping the background out. Since I do not use any particular green screen or uniform color background that is reliable enough for use with a magic wand tool for erase, I have to manually erase the background stuff. This process normally takes an hour to an hour and a half, sometimes more, so put on your favorite tunes and start erasing away. You will make mistakes and you will get burnt out looking for every small and meticulous pixel to make the perfect edit. It’s a labor of love, trust me. For this process, I favor Paint tool SAI on my computer and using a Bamboo tablet in order to guide the cursor at the bits I wish to erase. Your final product may be imperfect, but Instagram typically compresses the image into a smaller resolution, which makes minute blemishes and faults largely unnoticeable. After I complete the crop out of the piece of kit, I upload the png of the kit to Canva.con where I superimpose it over a color background of choice. This is where actually messing around with saturation, brightness and tint settings absolutely matter. What I’ve learned over time is that the background color should compliment a certain color on the piece of kit you want to really pop out. Personally I’ve been favoring the pastel orange backgrounds for the fact that they compliment the Coyote velcro on Crye carriers and the tan Hypalon material so well. From there you also have to make saturation, brightness and lighting adjustments to the kit in order to make that color pop out while maintaining color integrity of the rest of the kit.
Assuming everything looked fine after the editing on Canva.com, the post should be more than sufficient to post on Instagram. However, I do add text on my edits, and this is where Inkscape comes into play. Inkscape allows me to add text and extra textures or design in an SVG file, or scalable graphic vector. However this information isn’t pertinent to the topic at hand. What is more important here is that I can add text to the image then export it as an extra png file. RNI films is an extra step but I highly favor this app for the fact that I can make my post look like a beat up magazine catalog advertisement. So this app has multiple options for grain/film filters, which gives my more recent posts that retro feeling to it. This step is optional, but it can also compensate for lower image quality resolution.
With all said here, this is my creative process behind Ryce Precision. It’s nothing crazy, just requires a little craftiness and experimentation.
Onto my design philosophies... I’ve beat this topic like a dead horse, however I feel that SuperCrye and myself set ourselves different from other tactical content creators on Instagram by virtue of how we present the gear. My end goal of my content is to energize the viewer with the kit picture rather than provide a run of the mill down-saturated picture taken in front of a Forward Observations Group flag. Essentially viewing gear as a perfectly normal item to own rather than something that only muscled men with a mean mug own. For this, I’ve taken inspiration from SuperDry catalogs, Urban Outfitters interiors, Uniqlo and other popular street wear shops. This said, however I am cognizant that this style of presenting gear isn’t the most popular and probably will never be popular again, but it’s a design philosophy I fall most in line with. My major takeaway with my method of design is to normalize ownership of gear. To shift away from the otherwise conservative method of presenting gear on social media. However, my advice to future content creators is to stick to your guns (no pun intended), and stick with a design that you think works best for you, but do not be afraid to experiment and branch out. Even if it does result in a self-perceived failure, you have learned from a mistake and can course correct or stick with the original formula.
Thank you so much for the good information :)