Photo of the Week - Week 1

Here's to the start of a new year and the goal of a post per week this year. Last year I had the same goal and got to around 40 out of 52 posts.

I have wanted to try to do a composite photo - take several photos and then composite them together into a single image. I decided that I wanted to try this during a recent portrait session with some friends and to keep it relatively simple - everything against a white background.

The first thing I did was sketch out on paper the final setup I wanted to have. This allowed me to plan the lighting and figure out how to try and make it consistent around the subjects (six people in this case), as well as the placement of the subjects. I also wanted each of the individual portrait-pieces to be able to stand on its own as a portrait of each subject.

I began by photographing each of the subjects against a white backdrop, which I digitally edited later to make sure I had a pure white background. The only issue, then, is that everyone looks like they are kind of floating there in white space; I decided to make a faux reflection for each of them. Being the first time trying this, sometimes it worked well, sometimes it didn't do so well. I played with a few different ways of doing this, from just mirroring both legs at the same time to making an individual mirror layer for each leg.

Here are two of the six individual images:

Now that I had the six individual images, the next step was to combine them together into the composite image.

I made one huge blank image in Photoshop and added each of the images as an individual layer. Then it was a matter of positioning each of them and making the layer masks for each layer to put them behind/in front of each other. At the end I just cropped out the final image to the proportions I wanted.

And here is the final composite image:

For me, this was more of an exercise to see what I could do than anything. Having a small studio here, it can be challenging to get a good group shot; usually I end up having to Photoshop out parts of the image where you can see parts beyond the backdrop on either side. Thus far I've gone with a white background because many of the people I have taken portraits of have dark hair - black hair against a black backdrop (without a hair light) is problematic.