The photograph at left is inspired mostly by the great weather we had here in Seattle in the past two weeks. Until today it's been extremely bright in these parts and that ultra-brightness has contributed to my current perception of reality. Usually I have to ability to see things not just as they are but to see potential, photographically and creatively speaking, for what could be. Sometimes a city street is more than a city street if you think about it in the right way.
But lately when I drive around it seems to me that the landscape is exactly what is seems to be. In fact it often has a sense of ultra-reality, like I'm driving on a movie set and all the buildings are fake and nothing exists beyond their facades. The only thing that's real is me, my car, and the street I'm driving on. It's like I'm driving around in a Dave Hill photo with the high pass sharpening turned up to 11. I attribute this to both a state of mind and to the abundance sunshine in the city of rain. So now you know the state of mind I've been in for a bit. Hang on because it comes into play again later in the story.
Yesterday I lent my studio out to my friend and fellow photographer John Galfano. He had a shoot scheduled with Lauren and needed a place so I offered my studio (and whatever else we could find in the area). Last week when we made arrangements he asked if I wanted to shoot her also. I politely declined since I didn't really have any ideas to shoot. I said just use the studio and I'll hang out and help if I can. I actually like playing technical consultant when I can so I was fine with that. But in between last week and this that changed a bit.
Like I said I had been experiencing the landscape as a sense of hyper-reality but I didn't know what to make of it. I figured it was circumstance and that was it. But as I was sitting around the day before the shoot I had an idea that this sense of hyper-reality lent itself to being on the verge of a dream-like state. Then I had an idea. What popped into my noggin was something along the lines of the shot above -- a very high key, faded out shot of a woman. I was thinking that high brightness could somehow suggest other-worldliness about the scene. The trouble was I would have to do it all in post and I wasn't sure how to go about it.
So toward the end of the day we went up on the roof of my building. We had to descend three flights of stairs then turn around and climb up five stories to the roof. This meant there was no way we were going to carry C-stands and studio lights up there. We went back to the basics and took a couple speedlights and a mini-boom. I decided it was there that I would make the frames for the shot.
So here are the technical details:
This shot a composite of two frames -- I locked the camera down on a tripod and shot one frame with the model and lightstand (it had to be in the frame due to the short length of the mini-boom) and one frame with nothing in the scene exposed a stop above ambient. I needed as much information as I could get in the frames without underexposing or blowing out. The lighting is a single light source composed of two speedlights ganged and shot into a reflective umbrella high and overhead in front of the subject.
In post I did all I could to make the image as high key as possible without completely blowing everything out. This meant lots of curves layers set to screen blending mode and lots of selective masking. I got the image to what I thought was a final state and then decided to play with it a bit. I pulled the "final" image back into photoshop along with the background-only image. Something wasn't quite right and I was messing around to see if I could get it settled. In doing so I had a nice accident: in changing the opacity of the top level (with the model) she became semi-transparent. It was an unintended effect but I liked it so I stuck with it. To give the overall image a dreamy feel I applied a radial blur to the background along with some general tonality changes.
It was a fun challenge but I'll leave it to the reader viewer to judge whether I succeeded.
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