Teach it Tuesday | Behind the scenes on a creative family portrait session
When my son's pre-k (what they call pre-kindergarten here in the states) teacher asked for a recent family photo I knew we had to do one up the one from last year.
I sat down with my sketch book and created 4 or 5 really awesome concepts that I thought would be fun to photograph and process... after all, if this becomes a chore it defeats the purpose right? In the end we decided to make a photograph around my sons favorite toy, a colonial era brick fort... we just switched out the Red Coats and Yankee soldiers for fairies, goblins and lost boys.
The gear:
Nikon D800
Nikon 50mm f/1.4G
my busted up tripod (thanks to my buddy Scott who helped me get it fixed up)
2 x led light boxes on light stands (you can buy them here)
The Process:
I photographed the fort first, and placed markers where I though each of us would be located in the final image. This helped me determine the right perspective, light and shadow placement. Once we had a good plan together, I had each family member stand in and do several poses, screams and attach motions. For the boys I positioned the camera above our heads to give the illusion that you were looking down on us and for the girls I laid on the floor and had them stand on a crate so it looked like you were looking up at them. Once we had all of the photos that we needed I loaded them all into Photoshop and extracted each character from their background, matched color, brightness and sharpness. You can watch that whole process here:
It took me about an hour and half to photograph the fort and each character in costume and another 5 or 6 hours in post processing. The final image is hanging in my sons class room right now :)
Teach It Tuesday.
Teach it Tuesday.
I often get asked how I shot or processed certain shots today I am going to explain how I put this shot together. Last year I shot similar photo to this. The previosu photograph was taken in the early evening when lighting conditions are more favorable. This time around I wanted to challenge myself with a noon day sun.
The camera was placed on a tripod and I used a 10 second self timer to take the actual photo.
Take a look at the animated GIF below. In the first frame of the GIF, my face is completely in shadow. I can increase my exposure, so that my face is shown, but this will blow out the sky. I really want to keep the sky and these awesome clouds so I need more light on my face. I set up 2 strobes. One on the left at 1/8th power and one on the right at 1/2 power. The shot is quite simple.
In processing the shot, as you can see in the GIF, I started by removing the distracting elements like the light stand and the power lines. Then I started working on contrast, detail and color toning. Lastly, I hand painted in the dirt and dust cloud.
The key to this shot (for me) is adding light to the subject so that they stand out of the brightly lit background. I am using Photoshop to remove distractions and to add more detail and tone in the areas that need it.
The shoot itself took about 10 minutes and processing took about an hour and a half…
If you have questions, please send me a note and let me know!
