Wedding Composite

Every composite image has at it's core a destination where the artist must in-vision the end in order to know how to navigate from the beginning. Sometimes though a composite may arise from the ashes so to speak. Todays post is about the latter and not the former.

In todays example I am using a bride who signed the second verse of a song to he imminent husband. Obviously this can not all be captured in one image so a composite image lends itself to this situation. Here are the steps I took.

First was an image that can be used as a background. Of course the elements obstructing the background must be cloned out in order to provide a clean slate for the subjects in the foreground. One point here is that you may want to wait until you have the subjects positioned in the foreground befor you completely clone out the background. This way you don't have to do as much cloning as the foreground images bloc much of what gets cloned anyway.

In the case above I chose to completely clone out the background subjects so I could use this image another time rather than just for this composited image. From one of the images with the bride and groom I extracted the groom for this image.

All images are on separate layers to allow a logical stacking of the subjects. Below I have the bride in the position she was standing in relation to the groom.

The bride had to be extracted in order to make the stacking of the brides work for the composite. Below is the next image (sign) of the bride.

There are a total of five images of the bride that needed to be extracted from other images. This was a simple but tedious process. Selecting the bride from each of the images and copying them into the composite image was the easy part. Each bride layer had to have a layer mask to isolate the bride from the selection of the original image. This was the tedious part but well worth it to make it half way believable.

These two layers were critical in aligning the brides for the composite. Below you can see how they gave me a reference to each head and shoulder of the bride.

Now comes the tricky part. While the brides are placed in a stack, the overlap of parts must be worked to again make it believable. This first image shows the stack uncorrected. You can see where the vail is blocking the dress and arm of the bride stacked behind.

Through a series of selections, opacity adjustments, the image became more believable. Below is the layer of parts that needed to be added to show some transparency in the vail. (It is shown on a black background so you can better see the example).

Part of the problem I had with the vail is being transparent, it brought over the background from the original image. Some cloning... Ok, a lot of cloning was employed to eradicate the remnant background. The image above is not all on the same layer as that would not have worked at all. Each part has its own layer because it required a different level of opacity to make it realistic.

So now with all the layers on to show the entire sequence we have an almost finished composited image.

This would be fine for a final image except for anyone who was at the wedding, There was a trellis made from branches that set the outdoor scene for the couple. In another image I had extracted the trellis which in and of itself was a monumental task but now I have one. So I dropped it in just in front of the background, did a little free transformation and viol á, a composited image of a beautiful moment in a scenic outdoor wedding. 

Double click on the last image as it will actually get bigger than the other images in the post.

Enjoy... Doug

Wow, Where did September go. Ok I was on vacation for three weeks but still, wouldn't you think I would have time to do a blog post here and there. Oh well, guess that is water under the bridge now.

It's been a little over a month since I shot my son's wedding and the images have been coming slow. I am not sure it I am being to picky or if I am too emotionally attached to the images. Usually I can fly thought image selection but this time it came slow. It has been spaced out a little also. Just last week we shot the rings. It is nice to have the couple local to be able to do that with. So with those all shot it was into Photoshop to get the finished. Here are some of the examples.

 These are all straight forward shots of stacked rings. The on one below with the bible is slightly different ion that both rings make the heart shadow in the gutter of the bible. Interesting though is how the lighting creates relatively the same heart shape while the grooms ring is laying down and the brides is standing up. The shot was taken with tungsten light (the ceiling light in the room overhead) with an EF50 f/1.4 USM at 1/6 seconds at f/11 and 100 ISO. I needed f/11 to get both rings in focus with that 50mm lens and ended up stacking sharpness (-100) adjustment brushes in Lightroom.

I would have used onOnes Focal point but was getting error messages when I went to the plugin from CS5 so I had to improvise. I fixed the memory error by rebooting but didn't want to in the heat of battle so I improvised and liked what I had.

The next image I have receive the most comments from as it seems the brides ring is floating in air.

 This one surprisingly was one of the easiest to edit. It was only three layers in CS5. The image below is where I started. The grooms ring is about eight inches behind the brides. It was shot with the same lens only at 1/100 second at f/4 however the light was constant fluorescent. I positioned the camera to have the stones in the circle of the grooms ring. My first action was to do a rough selection of the rings and put them on their own layer. Next was to fill the Wii controller and rings. Looking back now it would have been easier to just create my own background but the blending of the isolated rings would have been much harder. Finally on the third layer I copied the brides ring, selected and filled to black, compressed it with free transform, and finally ran a gaussian blur on it. When it made the trip back to Lightroom I sharpened, lightened, and boosted the clarity with the localized adjustment brush (I just love that thing).

The last ring shot was somewhat of a progression project. Below is the stating image right out of the camera. It was shot with an EF 24-105 f/4 IS USM at 1/160 second, f/18 and 100 ISO. Shot on a piece of foam-core board and lit with an Alien Bee's Ring flash and way low power.

Isolated and fixed up, the image above was the final until my son said it looked like an advertisement. It was off tho the web to find a Helzberg logo which none were going to work without some serious help. At least not to the size I wanted to use.

I brought a file into CS5 and used the background eraser tool which left the enlarges small jpg file all jagged. Spent some time with the pen tool creating a vector mask which I could much easier scale to my hearts content resulting in the image you see above.

That's going to do it for now, hopefully it will not be November before my nest post.

Take care... Doug

What a month!

Have you ever had one of those times where you were so busy doing other things that you hardly got anything done that you might have done had you not been so busy. Yep, if you got that, you know what my August has been like.

Earlier this year my youngest son Tom trekked down to Chattanooga TN to propose to his girlfriend of three and a half years. That was in May. Samantha was working as a signer in a school system and could not move until the end of the school year. It was announced that the 20th of August would be the day. This took all those wedding planning guides and threw them out the window. No more 18 months before, 12 months before, or even 6 months before. Not only was there going to be an aggressive planning schedule, two other dynamics of this joyous moment were present. First the day is my wife's birthday and second, they asked if I would want to do the photography. 

 Engagement photos.

Of course I was honored to do the photography but also hesitant at the same time. I had to find out if it would be alright with my wife as I would miss sitting next to her experiencing the joy together. Did I want to work that hard on a day that I should be relaxed and enjoy the moment. After all, it would be my first solo wedding. All things considered, the answer was yes. Even though I knew I was jumping right into the middle of the fire.

One of the benefits of this decision was being able to work closely with Samantha though the summer and almost everyday of my vacation in August (so much for the Harley ride). She has really become my daughter, not just daughter-in-law. I did not realize that I would become one of the goto people on the day of the wedding but I had a lot of fun shooting all the preparation shots from nails to hair.

The plan was to shoot the bride with the wedding party and then the groom with the wedding party while they would not see each other until the alter. This is where the schedule started going south. We had to shuttle between two different towns which took more time than expected. The timeline started to go long to the point that the chairs were not at the park thirty minutes before the service. The first thing that went was the pre-cerimony shoot and some of the decorations at the cerimony. The chairs showed up, people got seated and the party started relatively close to the appointed time.

It had rained really hard in the morning and we did not know if we were going to have to shift to plan B. This was partly why the chairs were late. The clouds cleared and the grass was dry so the park turned out to be a wonderful location for the ceremony. We were able to shuffle though all the official shots and get the group off to the reception. I will talk about the ceremony next week when I get more images up. I will leave you with this one as i did not notice it until I was in post. The emotion Samantha expresses reflects the entire ceremony.

You may need to zoom in, but you will see it.

Take care...  Doug

Killer Cuff Links

A quickie today folks. One more from the wedding las weekend. At the reception dinner on Friday night the bride gave the groom a very nice pair of cuff links. Take a look...

Ok, so the groom is a huge Transformer fan. I can not fault him for that though. Nice Links Allan!

Doug

Paparazzi Wedding

Yesterday I had a couple of shots of the wedding rehearsal and today I have some from the wedding. There was another lady that wanted to get some shooting time in as she had not shot a wedding before. I was not there to officially second shoot but was asked by the bride and groom to take “some pictures” when I was not officiating in my capacity as Master of Ceremony. No problem… Except with three shooters at times it looked like the paparazzi and come to town.

So the wedding was at three and the pictures were to be at noon as set by the photographer (the real one). I pull into the church at 11:15 with camera bag in one hand and suit in the other. I figured I might just as well run around casual and change to formal before the wedding. Without going into explicit detail, the photos got off to a very late start but that gave me a little more time to grab shots out of the ordinary like the one below.

I knew I would be leaving the service right after the wedding to open the reception hall so there was no hope of getting the full service coverage. I was not there for that anyhow. I was not able to get the bride and bridesmaid photos but got a decent on of the groom and groomsmen seen below.

My wife was down helping the bride and later told me the second shooter took the mirror shot and said “Oops, I’m, in the shot.” With that tidbit of 411 I headed down to the gals room and asked the bride if she would mind if I got some shots. The next two images are of the bride looking into the mirror.

The mirror was really tricky in post production in that it picked up the green tint from the fluorescent lights in the room. To correct this I adjusted white balance and then painted some blue into the mirror area to balance it out.

The following shot was of the bride just after I got into the room. It was starting to run behind and she was a little edgy so I just wanted to grab a couple of shots ant get going. It is a full on ¾ front shot that turned into a bust of the bride.

The couple wanted to honor the tradition of the bride and groom not seeing each other on the wedding day until the service but wanted to have a moment alone. My daughter was married at the same church a couple of years ago and used a hall barricade to separate the two of them so they could converse, hold hands, and pray. It makes a nice shot also.

During the service I was getting some stealth shots with the EF 70-200 f/2.8 L IS lens and saw an opportunity to get one of “the shots” so I made my way along the side of the auditorium to get into position. It would be of the unity candle and the couple.

I think this shot typifies the wedding day. A beautiful glow of candle light across the brides face illuminating her as the primary subject with the groom in shadow showing his willingness to rise his bride to prominence. Almost Biblical I'd say!

Well that wraps it for today... Doug

Wedding Bells

Saturday my wife an I were the Master and Mistress of Ceremony for one our best friends wedding. As much of an honor as that is, they also wanted to take some pictures during the service and reception. This is in addition to the Wedding Photographer which was a good friend of the brides mother.

So at the rehearsal to which this other shooter was there, I spoke with her and figured the best way to not let feathers get ruffled was to give her my images also. I was certainly not there for the money and figured good will is better than poor feelings.

Anyhow here are a couple of the rehearsal images that I thought were really nice. This first one of the unity candle is with a 50 prime at f/1.4. The bride and groom are in bokeh in the background.

I was using the 5D Mk II for the low light and was switching between flash and no flash. I was waiting for the wedding party to start their practice walk and saw the flower girl peek her head around the entrance vail.

Ok... Lets all go Aaaaah!

I will download the rest of the images today and see what I com up with.

Cya... Doug

It's a Ring Thing

At least for the time being we are not wedding photographers, not that that may not be a direction we take in the future. But for now we will work in the periphery of wedding photography.

Some friend of ours just got engaged and wanted some nice pictures of the engagement ring. Not having taken thee images before I spent some time earlier in the day experimenting with different lighting to see what worked the best. I tried a pair 580 EX2 Speedlites in Lastolite EZ-Box's. As those are soft boxes they did not provide a hard enough light for the sparkle of the diamonds. The flashes by themselves being hard but created double shadows and just was not doing the trick.

Enter the AlienBees™ ABR800 Ringflash. This jewel worked as well as those that were being shot. No shadows and with a 20° grid mounted the light was not going every where. The hand shot was done in somewhat of a duotone fashion to isolate the ring. Lets face it... Even nice petit hands such as Aly's still look harsh under a flash. So in addition to the duotone effect, using Lightroom's adjustment brush I dropped the clarity and sharpness down and painted the hand. The detail that helps here was in the nails. The duotone effect made the nails look flat so I brushed in a little increased exposure to bring the tips back.

We took the ring and slid it though some white nit fabric to just get the ring itself. I had the ringflash dials way down and the aperture at f/16 so the flash would not overpower the ring with the closeness of the lens. If I recall I had the EF 24-105 f/4 IS lens all the way out and moved into the ring until it would not focus then backed off about an inch to catch the focus. It was about 10 to 12 inches from the ring if I remember.

I think Aly enjoyed the process as after the shoot I let the images download to Lightroom while we all had desert. We finished by going through the 60 or so images until we came up with 15 or so that I would further process. While there I did finish off one image so I could e-mail it to her so she could get it up on facebook. The left the house about 11:oo and I noticed on Facebook that at 11:53 she had posted the picture. Guess she was happy with it. Thanks for letting us be a part of your experience Aly.

Time to blast!

Cya... Doug