Kevin Thom - Hamilton, Toronto, Ontario Photographer

Initially, Nico wasn't convinced that she wanted to participate in the photo shoot.

Most of the time, I try to get the shot right in the camera. I’ve never thought of myself as a Photoshop artist, although I use Photoshop on a daily basis for minor things like removing blemishes and adjusting color. However, sometimes an idea just calls out for a change to the “normal” policy.

Heidi came to me with the idea of doing some fun and slightly surreal portraits with her family. We would use some Photoshop tricks to make an unusual final image. The key was to convince the talent, her daughter Nico, to go along with the shoot. Nico’s a little bit camera shy. However, with the promise that she could dress up like a princess, and wear a little makeup, a deal was struck. We decided to shoot the photos with a “tea party” theme, to match the princess outfit. The final image was going to be Nico holding a teacup with her parents inside.

Because Nico needed a little bit of encouragement to warm up to the idea of being in front of the camera, we practiced by taking some pictures of Heidi and David. Not only did seeing Mom and Dad in their photos allow Nico to get more comfortable with the studio, but it also gave me the opportunity to practice some of the techniques we’d use to create the final composite image.

Eventually, with the aid of Heidi and David’s skillful persuasive skills, Nico felt comfortable enough to pose for her photo. She did a great job imagining she was holding her parents in the cup, and keeping her pinkie fingers out like a proper lady. Next, we photographed Mom and Dad. I put them against a light colored background so that it would be easier to blend them with Nico’s dress. I had them hold a sheet of cardboard in front of them on the same angle as the edge of the teacup in Nico’s photo, so that it would keep their hands in line and help the pose look  more natural.

Finally, we put it all together in Photoshop. I cut Heidi and David out of their background and dropped them into the photo of Nico. I used a layer mask to clip around the fingers as closely as possible. I used Photoshop’s puppet warp feature to adjust David’s arm a little so it looked like he was leaning on the edge of the cup. I duplicated Heidi and David’s layer, clicked on the “preserve transparency” button, and filled it with black. This created a silhouette of them, which I dropped underneath their original image layer. By applying a Gaussian blur and dropping its opacity down to about 20%, it created a shadow. I masked out all of this shadow except the areas around the fingertips. This added a little bit of depth to that transition between them and the cup. I also brought in a little bit of this shadow under David’s elbow, so it looked like he was casting a shadow on the right side of the cup. Next, I created another shadow layer, with even more Gaussian blur, and dropped it behind David and Heidi’s layer onto Nico’s dress. The higher level of blur implies a greater distance, and I found this improved the impression of depth. Finally, I used the blur tool to blur David and Heidi’s fingertips a little bit, so they’d match the slightly out-of-focus appearance of the edge of the cup.

The final image is pretty entertaining, I think, and is definitely not your average family portrait. Thanks to Heidi and David and Nico for helping me to create something a little different.

Bonus images

Here are the two “practice images” we shot to help warm Nico up to the idea.

When I work with Laura Hollick, my job is as the photographer is to be the visual editor. A lot of photographers talk about editing as the process that happens after the shoot, with choosing and touching up photos. While I agree that’s something that needs to happen, I also think a good deal of the editing must be done before and during a shoot. The energy you direct towards this important editing phase, especially when you’re doing conceptual work, the easier and smoother your post-shoot editing process will be. It doesn’t mean that every single detail must be planned in advance, but it does allow you to hone your visual communication down to its essence so that your photos are “speaking” clearly and strongly.

Anyway, Laura is a bursting fountain of ideas. She’ll bring an idea to me, and it’s up to me to compress it into the rectangular frame of a photo. In a recent shoot, Laura wanted to put a black fairy in a swamp with an interesting dead tree. She’d found this location on a drive in the country, and asked if we could do a photo there. I scouted the location with her, and we decided the tree would make a great counter-balance to a sculptural costume piece she’d made in her studio. The sculpture, along with the tree, would form the wings of the black fairy, and communicate the concept of her connection to nature. Whenever there’s an opportunity to scout a location before the shoot, I do it. Sometimes time constraints or other circumstances don’t allow this, but if it’s at all possible, I’ll take the opportunity. Scouting a location allows you to come prepared for any difficulties the site may present, as well as giving you an idea what time of day and weather conditions will yield the best shooting conditions.

I took the photos above on the day of the shoot. These “sketches” are an important part of my editing process as we move towards getting the final shot. I tried various combinations of pose and camera position and orientation. I experimented with different focal lengths to try to come up with a good balance between drama and distraction.

As a side note, one factor of primary importance to me is the comfort of the model or subject of the photo. If the person you’re shooting is uncomfortable, you’re almost certain to get a bad photo of them. This is one reason Laura wasn’t wearing her costume in the sketch photos until we needed it to figure out the composition. I don’t want to feel rushed because she might be feeling uncomfortable or awkward in a costume. So, we avoid putting the costume on until absolutely necessary.

There were a lot of competing elements in this location, including trees, bushes, tall grasses, reflections, clouds, etc. I wanted to keep the black fairy clear of distractions, but in balance with other environmental elements so she would stand out. At the same time, we were limited by the fact that the tree had to be in the right position in the frame to form that other wing. In the end, I found just the right spot and focal length to get the shot. Laura was standing on a chair, which was slowly but surely sinking into the marshy ground; we had to work quickly once her costume was in place, otherwise our whole setup would have toppled into the swamp! Laura did a great job of looking serene, even as the chair inexorably tilted towards the water. We’d been blessed by a stormy-looking sky that day, so I snapped a series of bracketed shots so I could maintain the detail of those beautiful clouds. Later, I discovered that judicious processing of the RAW file allowed me to extract the detail from just a single exposure.

Here's the final image of Laura Hollick as the Black Fairy in the swamp.

Laura Hollick and I shot a promotional photo to advertise of her upcoming Creativity Cleanse telecourse. It’s always a pleasure to shoot something that has such a strong concept just from the name. It wasn’t difficult to come up with the idea of a multicolored bath.

Because I had a good idea of what the finished image would look like, I was able to capture all of the elements on the day of the shoot. I knew I wanted the water in the bath to be some kind of color. In Photoshop, it’s relatively easy to change a color to some other color, but to realistically add color to something that doesn’t have color is difficult to do–at least for me, because I’m a photographer, not a painter! Coloring clear water would have been nearly impossible for me. So, we used some tempera paint to tint the water blue. As we added the paint to the tub, I shot a bunch of frames of the blue paint clouding the clear water, just in case they’d come in useful later.

I set up a bare strobe to bounce light off the white ceiling. This gave us some bright and even light from above. Then we experimented with a few different poses to get the base photo. We ended up with the pose below because Laura’s body made an interesting and attractive shape, and we were able to cover everything that needed to be covered. I had Laura swish the water around in the tub before each shot to create some texture in the water and to further obscure herself.

Once I got the images into Photoshop, I started creating the rainbow effect. I tried a few different methods with masking, gradients, and hue and saturation layers. Eventually, I settled on using those images of the paint clouds in the clear water, because they were the only thing that looked organic and realistic enough to create that rainbow bath effect we wanted. I made a composite of several of these clouds, rotating them and shifting their hue and saturation to make them different colors.

When layered on top of the bath image, this became the base for the rainbow effect. I used vector masks to allow non-water areas to show through. The Wacom tablet really helps in creating these masks. Touch sensitivity allows you to vary the brush size and pressure so that you can create smooth blends. I added a number of other layers of paint clouds of different colors, using different blending modes until it looked just right. Here’s the layers palette so you can see the various components.

The challenge was to control which colors made it into the finished image, because it had to look bright and not muddy, colorful but not too cluttered. The final image actually didn’t use all of the color layers that I’d created. It was nice to have the options, but in the end, we decided on a simpler color combination that’s really in-line with Laura’s branding.

The final step was to put it into context on a banner that could be used on Laura’s website. I used more paint clouds to make it balance with the text and the white background. Voila!