Happy Holidays to you all. The biggest inspiration for this photo was “Dali Atomicus” by Philippe Halsman shown below. The dynamic nature of the photo is amazing, and as Alison pointed out, the “madness” theme of the photo is perfect for Dali. And I suppose, by default, for us as well.
According to http://galadarling.com/article/dali-atomicus:
“This photograph was shot live. It took 26 attempts, & over five hours to get it to look like this.”
First of all, amazing. Second, there’s no way in hell I’m going to toss my cat in the air multiple times. Instead I gently held her in position, then photoshopped any suspicious fingers out of the way, added her motion blur, and drop shadow to the wall, all in post production. In retrospect, there was a bit too much post production in our photo. But with no assistant and low lighting (diffused lampshades, china balls, and tracked ceiling spotlights, all of different color temperatures), we had to composite everything to get everything and everybody in focus. I also took the liberty to perfect our skin using some of the many tricks available online. Not… that anyone need skin clearing… I swear. My scarf was held up by Ali with a coat hanger, which was also shopped out and motion blurred added after the fact. The sepia/vignetted nature to the photo was whipped up using a modified template in Adobe Lightroom, my photo processing software of choice.
Next year, less compositing (which led to some of my least favorite aspects of the photo) and more of the Philippe Halsman’s live approach. Maybe even a strobe kit if Santa is good to me. We shall not “fix it in post”.
Written by Mauricio Balvanera
Topics: projects