Changing background!

Petra asked me if I could be her substitute for one day. Her students where just busy with an assignment in which they needed to shoot a product shot, a background picture and combine the two in Photoshop.

On that particular day the students where to clip their product shot and paste it into the new background, adjust the looks to fit and add a shadow or reflection if needed.

So what could I do to prepare myself, and at the same time have something to show that makes it worth while for the students. Digging on my hard disks turned up this picture I once upon a long ago made for some harmless fun.

Photocredtis: Lieson Kyläkauppa by Anni Loukomies, Elephant through Google image search from www.konicaminolta.com.

Luckily I was still in possession of the layered psd file which contained the originals and the workflow to show the students.

Disclaimer: I do not own the original photo's, nor did I use the end result anywhere commercially. I just did some retouching for fun.

A great example how a clipped object gets integrated into a new background. So I could easily explain step by step how to attack such a task.

To make sure I had enough material with me for the students, I dug up another old trick just in case.

Sometimes you don't like the existing background enough and you just don't have time and money to come up with a new one. Well in those cases you can always create a new background from scratch with the materials at hand. 

From This:

To That:

Most of the times you don't need much more then a little imagination and half an hour of Photoshop. Have a look at the video below if you want to know how it was done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFsxX6lMWwQ&feature=youtu.be

If you want to give it a go yourself, get the original tulip file from overhere and follow the tutorial at HD quality on YouTube. You can also slow it down in the settings.

Good Luck!

Shattered Rose!

Yesterday I stumbled on this assignment on Imagebrief.com, a client wanted an image of a shattered flower, aSAP.

Doing a quick Google gave me all the info I needed straight away.

Just drop the flowers in "Liquid Nitrogen" and smash them up, sounded like fun.

Some roses I happened to have left, from another project.
So a quick search for liquid nitrogen nearby my place, and I was on my way.

At Kaasumestarit I got some great service, and for only 16 euros I bought 2 kilo's of dry ice (-78,5 °C). Not as cold as liquid nitrogen (-196 °C), but a bit cheaper and less hassle. And within an hour I was shooting.

My way of thinking was just burying the rose between the dry ice and wait 5-10 minutes and see how hard it had become.

The rose was not totally frozen yet, but enough for my purposes. 

And within no time a had a collection of shattered roses.

It was so easy and so much fun to do that I just couldn't stop, and went on and did some others. Do you recognise the flowers I used?

Making of a Christmas Card.

Like many families, we make our own christmas card, this was ours for 2013.

Once the initial idea was born and a quick sketch was made, I ran outside to quickly catch still a glimpse of day and the few millimeters of snow that had just fallen in Helsinki.

Shot against the sun, flagging the camera lens by hand, it was the perfect lightning to create the impression of a full moon shining on the snow. Developed in Camera Raw slightly darker and colder to enhance the night feeling.

The next day I was able to shoot us models against a cloudy sky (which worked as a giant softbox) during twilight hours to get advantage of a simple led construction lamp.

Back home while transferring the files, it was a digging into the archives to find the missing background sky to work with. And thanks to NASA for the moon.

Once all the clipping paths where made it was just a matter of transforming and putting the pieces at their right spot, placing the shadows and adjusting contrast/colour balance.

And after I figured out how our "Floorball Star" needed to look like, the biggest and tedious part could begin......

Creating a star-font!

Now we where up to the point my son was happy with his role in the picture, my wife liked the final look, but I myself was missing something still. If this was gonna be a christmas card, then I wanted it to look like a postcard.

So and old piece of paper, a nice clipping-path border, some dodging and burning later, combined with a simple reflection, I had my christmas carol card.

The card became a more or less realistic object, but with the white background becoming a part of the whole it also became too cold to look at.

Thus the added warm and dark wooden background. That also made it easier to look at the picture itself, since brighter parts have a tendency to demand more attentions from our eyes.

Signature and ready, if it was not for the fact that I have many non-religious and non-christian friends, and reaching out to them all with this message would be impossible. One more slight change was needed....

And when you have everything in individual layers there is nothing more easier then opening them up in after effects and move them around a little bit.

Peace to everybody ;)