When I first discovered Photoshop I would spend most of my time creating composite images. The creative possibilities seemed endless and as a frustrated amateur painter, struggling to translate the images in my head onto canvas, photoshop and photography was an absolute godsend!
As photography soon became my career I was spending less time creating composite images as they were time consuming and my focus had to be on providing my clients with the style of images they wanted.
As the years past I would still occasionally dabble in a little composite creativity here and there, but these past couple of years I have found my passion for this style of photography art has been reignited, and so in December I borrowed 2 of my nieces and asked them to bring along a few outfit changes and random props and bits and bobs that were personal to them.
I had no detailed plan set out, I just knew that I wanted to layer multiple versions of them, portraying the different sides of their personalities and their interests, to create one cohesive image.
They rocked up with suitcases full of random and amazing things, the shoot flowed organically and came together surprisingly easily!
To create this image I set my camera in a fixed position on a tripod and used my remote trigger to avoid any risk of accidentally nudging the camera.
I set up two strobe lights with soft boxes either side of the set, to create an even spread of light.
The girls got changed into their first outfits, casual winter attire. My youngest niece is a budding actress and had brought along one of her favourite books. We also popped up a couple of photographs of the two of them together when they were younger.
The next image they opted for pyjamas and childhood teddies. A really sweet touch I thought.
I directed them both on where I wanted them within the frame and how to pose, ensuring each image I took would work together as one.
Their parents are avid collectors of random vintage objects (as am I) and so they brought along a couple of guns. I thought it would be great fun for them to dress up in their sparkliest party outfits, cocktails in hand (actually cold tea but 🤫) and have some really fun with this one. I photoshopped a spilt cocktail shaker into the final image for good measure and a pair of my youngest nieces ballet shoes mid air, in line with gun fire.
I had to combine two images of this particular set in order to get the best facial expressions for both of them.
The final shot the girls chose their favourite festival gear, leopard print numbers. This was the final shot and I just had to make sure we included their Autograss racing trophies in there somewhere. Again I used two separate takes of this set to get the facial expressions I wanted.
In post processing I used the first image as my base and made rough selections of both of my nieces from every other image to be layered upon the base image. Some selections needed to be neater than others where they were being layered on top of another body. But the whole process was much easier than I had anticipated.
After some final ceiling and lighting and colour adjustments, I'm pretty pleased with the finished result. Hopefully I'll be getting some commissions for similar work in future, as we had so much fun shooting.
I love that each time you look at the image you discover something new.
