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For this episode, I'd like to offer another behind-the-scenes glimpse into a recent photo shoot I did with a friend of mine. He came to me with a pretty interesting idea, which was actually based on a photo he had seen of one of his favorite guitarists.After several failed attempts to capture him in a pose that really appeared as if he were falling forward, we came to a fork in the road. I realized that I basically had two options-- (1) either put a mattress or something soft in front of him so that he could REALLY fall forward without killing himself (or ripping his spiffy suit), or (2) dig into my bag of Photoshop tricks and try to achieve the desired effect in post-production. Naturally, I chose the latter, because I'm
Try this-- while looking at the before image in the upper left, imagine in your mind's eye if I had simply tilted his body forward in that exact pose. Since his front arm starts out parallel with the ground, it' s not hard to imagine that it would be sloping downward after the tilt, which clearly would NOT have made him look like he was reaching for the guitar floating straight in front of him. So I had to figure out a way to tilt his body while at the same time shifting his limbs back to where they needed to be.
If you draw an imaginary line connecting the two buttons on his blazer, then do the same thing in the final image, you can get a sense of how much I ended up tilting him forward-- probably a good 30-40 degrees. In order to reposition his limbs to the proper angle after tilting his torso, I mainly used a combination of the Free Transform tool, a few careful selections, and some good ol' cutting and pasting (with a few feathered layer masks). The most significant modification I made was probably the exaggeration of his back leg, whereas I kicked it up extra high for added drama. The end result is a much more off-balance appearance, adding to the sense of motion and tension in the image.
Cutting out the guitar out was a cinch using the Pen tool. Then I just used the Free Transform tool to reposition it and increase the size ever-so-slightly. Lastly, fake shadows were added to give the image a sense of groundedness, since you don't want your subjects floating in an endless sea of white. :-)
All in all, I think we managed to pull off what we were really going for with this image. If you've got any questions/comments/feedback, please feel free to leave them below. By the way, I *love* hearing everyone's different perspectives on these....it really makes it a lot of fun!
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