Model: A Behind the Scenes Look

Okay, took a ton of pictures this weekend, and my computer is gasping at me. Hope to fix that situation this evening. Anyway, I did promise some behind the scenes look at creation of some of my pictures and possibly a bit more.

Today we will be looking at my picture for "Model", to refresh your memories, here it is again in all it's glory:

Now, lets see what went into it. As you can see there are quite a few images merged into this. Lets look at the original main image, and several other ones I wanted to deal with. First off, these sprues are from some Warhammer Fantasy Battles miniatures that I never got around to cutting and assembling. Been a good 5 years since I even played the game, but I digress. I figured these would be a good starting point for the "IDEA" I had for this category. The trick was selection of the right sprue and background of the whole image. Here are several test shots of what I was attempting. I ended up going with this image out of all of them due to the angle and ease of focusing other images. I am not a image manipulation guru, I am just picking up some tricks here and there...
Next, I had to assemble a whole batch of "accessories" and heads for the picture. Originally I tried getting a friend of mine who had modelling experience to be the source images for this. Alas, schedules didn't work out and time was limited. Hence the selfies used here in the final product.

I ended up not using one image, but that's okay, I can deal with that.


Of course I neede my hat as an accessory.

Now I could go into further details about how it was done, but that gets too technical. Needless to say I spent a lot of time masking, scaling, and cloning to get the image just right. It took a lot of time, and work to do it. I am glad I got an honorable mention in this category, and even happier with how original it was. No one else did something like this. Till next time.

TSG Event #20... Son of Behind the Lights

Milking this one for what I can. Okay, I am just delaying working on the actual shots I did. They need some minor work before I can consider them good enough to send out to the group and the models. With talent like we had out there, shooters and models, I can't do anything less.

Toronto Strobist Group: Halloween Shoot

Well, it's middle of October and peoples thoughts turn from the turkey dinner to scary haunts, costumes and Hallowe'en. This strobist meet up was in the planning for about three weeks. We had a few set backs, models, stylists, people, the usual thing for these get togethers. At least we had a good location. One of the photographers volunteered his large back yard and the access to the ravine behind his home for a location. After all, what's a scary photo shoot without dark deep woods.

Of course with the shoot happening in the afternoon there was this problem with sunlight. Well with powerful enough lights that shouldn't be an issue. A few stations were set up and the Nikon people went one way and the Canon people went another. Another thing on my ever growing wish list. Radio remote triggers for flashes...

So here's the first series of behind the scenes shots with all of us shooters and the lights that some of them used.