Tinkerbell in a Bottle!

My composite shots seem to garner a lot of attention, not just from my website visitors but also from other professional photographers.  I really appreciate that, as that's a pretty good indication that you're doing something right.

My family likes to put together creative Christmas cards.  In 2008, we focused on Tinkerbell in a bottle, with my other two children sitting there amazed at the sight.  This was one of my very first composites, and it was pretty interesting how I put it all together.  I can't tell you how many layers this crazy image had, and plus I had to find some fairy dust.

Of course, my young daughter Mia loved the idea of posing as Tinkerbell for me, and she already had the costume for it.  Just to give you an idea of how this worked, I pulled her shoes off of some image on the internet.  I had to add her wings in a secondary shot.

The bottle was originally shot in the master shot of my other daughter and son looking at the bottle with Tinkerbell inside it, but I had to pull it out of that shot and give it a special treatment to make it look like Tinker was inside the bottle.   I was pretty amazed, by the way, that my 20-month-old son was looking in the right direction for this shot in synch with Elle.  What luck!

Here are the pics:

It may seem weird to have two master shots, the one above without  the kids and the one below with them in the shot.  Trust me, you'll definitely want both.

Take a look at the bottle above.  Believe it or not, but the bottle below is the same bottle.  You can see the shine on the upper-right part of the bottle.  If you look at the master shot above, you'll see my son's hand reflected in that bottle.  Since I shot it without the kids, I was able to pull the bottle from the first master shot and not have to remove my son's reflected hands.  See, told you that you'd want both master shots!

Now here is Mia in our bedroom trying to look like Tinkerbell!  This isn't the exact shot that I used for the final image, but you can see what I was doing here.  The master shot was intentionally shot from an upper angle, so I had to shoot this from an upper angle as well.  Big mistake shooting her on the bed as her feet/fairy shoes sunk into the mattress.  That's why I had to find a pair of Tinkerbell's shoes on the internet.  I lit up the fairy wings with some back-lighting, but it just didn't really work for me, so I found some wings on the internet for that, too.

For the final image, I had to actually cut my daughter's legs and shift the angle so it looks like she's flying/floating within the bottle.  The bottle is enlarged so we could get a better look at Tinkerbell inside it.  I had to do a lot of post-processing Photoshop work to make the bottle look reflective with her appearing to be inside it.  Not bad, huh?  From there I had to make it appear that her wand stuck outside the bottle throwing off pixie dust around the back of my older daughter Elle, around her and then to our Christmas message.