Project 52 – Week 27 – Picture in Picture

I’ve seen several shots like this recently and I liked the idea so I decided to give it a try myself. The latest one I saw that I really liked was shot by one of my favorite photographer’s, Douglas Sonders, where he shot the cover for Independent Banker Magazine. After thinking about how I wanted mine to look I headed out this afternoon with Josi to make it happen.

I wanted to do something similar to Douglas’ shot, with the clouds in the background, but unfortunately for us we had a pretty overcast sky with just a little bit of defined clouds in the sky. Lucky for me I got a decent shot of them before they broke up while I was getting my base exposure set up, so then I just had to tweak it and drop it into my final shots. It was cloudy and overcast, but that didn’t really help my exposure out – I ended up shooting at 1/200th at f/8 at ISO 100 to get the definition in the clouds that I wanted, so that meant my flashes were going to have to work harder than usual. And, once I had my camera setup on the tripod the clouds began to break up and move leaving me with a pretty uninteresting background.

I ended up using a two-light, cross light setup for this shot. My key light was the SB-800 at full power camera right into my new 43″ while umbrella (the old one had seen much better days) and for a slight rim light I used the SB-600 at 1/2 power through a Honl grid. Here is the setup shot:

There was quite a bit of Photoshop involved with creating the final image, and there is definitely much room more improvement. I really need to work on my masking and compositing skills. Regardless of that, I think I did a decent job. I took the shot of the clouds and edited it to be bluer and boosted its contrast and clarity to make it very well defined to use as the backgrounds. I stuck the shot of me holding the camera on top of it and did my best to mask away the crappy sky in order to reveal the good sky. After I got that done I moved on the the portrait itself.

I used the same cloudy background for the portrait and masked away the crappy background once again. Then I did my usual retouching, skin softening, sharpening, and soft light/high pass layers until I got the portrait looking good. I then made a new copy of the finished portrait and resized it to fit over the screen of the iPhone. I finished the whole thing up with a curves layer in Photoshop and them some slight warming and vignetting in Lightroom.

There’s definitely room to improve, especially in the masking part of composites. I’ll continue to practice and hopefully get better at it. Practice, practice, practice.

I also did one of Josi while we were out:

She wasn’t too happy to be out because it was a little chilly, but she’s a trooper for helping me anyway. Thanks, Josi!

That’s it for this week. Until next time…