Hi, I'm Chelsea. And for our book, Stunning Digital Photography
we're going over levitation photography. Now there are two ways to take a
levitation photograph:
the first way you just set a high shutter speed and have your subject
jump and it creates the illusion that their floating. The method
were going to be using is that
I'll be propping myself up with these books here, taking two pictures
and then blending the two exposures together in post
to make it look like I'm floating. The only hardware you really need
is a camera and a tripod, but because this is a self portrait for us
we're also using a remote shutter release and a few other pieces of equipment
I'll get into later. The first thing you'll want to do before you take your shot is
make your story.
So I had envisioned a couple sitting together and reading by fire
so I got these prop books and I got Tony, my
prop husband and found a nice nook of the house that would look good on camera.
So we set up our camera and a tripod
and kind of played around with the crop and the angle to make sure that we have
our fireplace in the shot and
the lamp and the chair, everything we thought would be attractive.
One interesting thing that we did was I really wanted it to look warm
I wanted it to look like the fire was glowing and we were nestled up and
comfortable in our home.
so we got another light on a tripod, another flash,
put an orange gel over and put it behind our fireplace which
actually goes completely through to the other side and had it
flash through at us so that we had nice warm lighting like the fire was glowing.
To trigger the flash that we set up behind the fireplace, we used
a PocketWizard. We also used the flash on top of our camera
to kinda bounce the light off of the wall and fill the room with light from the other
directions so that the lighting wasn't too hard.
Next, we set our camera timer to an 8 second delay
and just kind of posed for a while.
Once you get the pictures that you like, move out of your frame,
take a picture of your background and then it's time to bring your photos into
post processing.
Now that you finished taking your pictures, load them onto your computer
and use your editing software of choice to start merging your photos.
It doesn't matter which editing programming you use, I'm going to use
Photoshop, but as long as they can blend two pictures, you'll be all set.
I've loaded my pictures into Lightroom, so I'm going to click the levitation
photo of my choice
and then I'm going to choose a background picture to blend it with.
Using Ctrl click
I selected both pictures at once. Once you have your photo selected
right click, then choose Edit In, then go to
open as layers in Photoshop. Now that you have both of your pictures imported
into your editing program
put your levitation photo on top. So you can see,
the background is on the bottom. Select both of your pictures
go to Edit,
and auto align your layers to make sure that they match up.
Using the Auto projection option works just fine.
Next select your top layer, your levitation photo,
and create a mask. Click on your mask,
select your paintbrush tool and make sure that you're painting in black,
and you can start to erase the books out of your picture.
I like to make sure that my paint brushe is soft
and that my opacity is fairly low I have it at 48 right now.
So let me zoom in here,
I'll make my brush a little bit bigger, and you can start blending away
whatever it is you're levitating on.
So one problem we ran into when we started editing the pictures is that I
noticed that
the background picture had cooler lighting than
the picture with me levitating and I think it's because one of the flashes was
bouncing off me and making a warmer light.
So what I did was I selected my background photo
and in the adjustment layers I put a photo filter on
with the color orange and
warmed up the background a little bit until the color matched
the foreground better. That's pretty good.
And since you're opacity's low, you can just kind of blend the pictures together so that
the color differences isn't so obvious. Once you have your color adjusted, you can
continue
taking those books out out. Another problem that I ran into is that my skirt
was falling behind the books at one point so I can't just
use the layer mask and paint out the books. So what I did
was I selected a section of my skirt, making sure that I had the hemline
in there, and create a new layer to paste the piece of clothing into.
Now that you have part of the skirt pasted in,
you can move it. Go to Edit, Free Transform
and line it up with the rest of the hem.
Now that you have
the skirt in there, it's really rough, you can use an eraser
and I will just blend it in. This is kind of a rough example so I'm gonna do a
little bit more tweaking
and play around with this to get it just right and then I'll cut to
the finished product.
Next I'm going to reimport it into Lightroom by saving my photo
and finish up the rest of my editing there.
Now than I am in Lightroom I'll click on Develop
to finish editing and crop it down a little bit.
Next I'm going to soften my photo up to give it a warmer,
cozier feeling. By just roducing my clarity
just a little tiny bit. I usually like to just play with my adjustments a little
bit to get the
get a nice feel going in the picture. So it's all just a matter
taste. And there you have it! There is our finished levitation photo.
There are a few other pictures that I played around with it as well
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