Friday Night Project

After devouring an entire box of savoury shapes for dinner, a rare treat in London, I was left wonder how best to spend the rest of my Friday night. I was beginning to tire of *cough* 27 Dresses, I mean, as far as predictable rom coms go this was arguably the most predictable (but such is my dedication to the cause of wedding photography I'm prepared to go extraordinary lengths to understand what makes a bride tick!).

So, what to do? I couldn't help but notice the lovely late evening light streaming in through my large lounge room windows, so I made the decision to start a photographic assignment that's been on my to do list for a little while. But I had to work fast. The assignment involved setting the camera up on a tripod and shooting myself in various different poses then putting them together in Photoshop to make it look like I was everywhere at once. The problem with starting this this at 7:30pm was that during 20 frantic minutes of shooting (with no less than 6 changes of clothes) the amount of light had changed significantly which threw things out of whack.

I was very careful about setting things up and positioning myself for the photos. The way I put it together was to use the first photo I took (me on the drums) as the background then add the other shots as layers on top using only a cut out of myself and not the whole scene. To ensure a consistent look I set the camera to manual (f/4.0, 1/30th, ISO 400) and also used manual focus. With the same light the layering wouldn't have been a problem , but as the light had changed I attempted to adjust each photo in Lightroom to have the same exposure before exporting to Photoshop and putting it altogether, although this didn't really work that well. As a result I had to spend a lot of time on each photo cutting out the precise shape for each layer, if the light was the same for all images it wouldn't have needed to be so precise as the background (wall colour for instance) would have been identical and you wouldn't have been able to tell the layer from the background.

After this was all put together I imported the file back into Lightroom and applied a Surreal Edgy preset which I think suited the style of the image. So, without further adu I present the one man rock band.




As a side note I took another photo which I didn't use with me as a groupy sitting back to camera at the front of the scene. I decided not to use it as the 10mm lens distorts perspective in such a way that I took up too much of the frame. Sometimes less more.