Dancer on a Music Box!

This shot of Anna is one of my favorites.  Apparently, I didn't have a lot to do one day and I decided to put this shot of her on a music box.   Here's the original shot of her during a dress rehearsal for The Nutcracker:

Here's the music box:

  

If you notice, that's a mirror behind the stand where Anna would go.  So along with all the other challenges with a composite image, I now had to put a reflection of her in the mirror and make sure it's appropriately out of focus.  An interesting, fun challenge.  Here's the result:

It's not the first time I've done a composite shot with Anna.  Here's the final composite of a shot I did with her as well.  I shot her on the main street in Crystal Lake, IL, on a sleep Sunday afternoon.  Then I added some studio shots of her throughout the image.

Maternity Shots

Ah, I love taking maternity shots!  There is something so incredibly special about a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy, a new life so close to being born!  There are so many different ways you can do a maternity shoot, and I've only just begun to capture them.

Here are two examples:

The SuperMom Shot!

 This has been by far my most appreciated composite shot!  And it should be, as it pays tribute to all the crazy multi-tasking that Moms have to do.   I got the idea of shooting my wife, Beth, looking hot in her dress and then balancing the kids with hands and a foot as if they were as light as a feather!

I wanted to do the shot in the kid's playroom with all their play stuff out of focus in the background.

The shoot consisted of the master shot of Beth by herself doing this crazy balancing pose -- and smiling!  Notice how everything behind her is in focus.  All that will change for the final image.

Here are the shots of my girls.  I asked them to sit criss-cross applesauce and to look very relaxed.

For Casey, I wanted to add a little drama/tension to the shot, as if holding him up with her foot was a challenging balancing act.  To get the right shot, I needed to throw him up in the air and Beth took the picture of me doing it.  The shot had to be timed just right when I caught him.

Put it all together and here's the final composite:

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.