Friday, May 13, 2011

Day 272 of 365 - A Prelude To Dreams


Photo by Andrew Kufahl

A couple people asked about more information about this photo, so I'll give a somewhat short-and-sweet rundown of the image.

Lighting is a 28-inch softbox to the left and up high, aimed toward the camera. Another light is off to the right and bounced off the floor.

The pose was a little tricky because I wanted to make it look like I was falling, so I had to lean quite far back without actually falling. I had worked out the hand/arm positions ahead of time, and I really needed to get them in the right place for it to look like I wanted it to look. And this is where it got tricky, because... I took a swig of water and kept it in my mouth, started the timer on the camera, got into position and posed the lower part of my body, about 1 second before the timer went off I blew/sprayed the water out of my mouth, and then I had to complete the upper-body pose before the camera took the shot.

In post-processing I used my own variation of a cross-processing technique, leaning a little more to a blue-ish hue/tint. The more I looked at the photo, the more the water spray reminded me of a galaxy or night-sky filled with stars... so on a whim I added a blank layer, set the blending mode to "overlay" then painted pink blotches at about 10%, 20%, and 30% opacity. Then I would go back with the eraser and erase areas at 10%, 20%, and 30% opacity until it looked good. Because it was "overlay" mode, the pink actually turned blue. I liked the blue, but wanted to complete the "galaxy" thing by adding pink, so I added another blank layer (this type leaving the blending mode as "normal") and once again lightly painted and erased pink until I liked how it looked.

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