With an impressive set of credentials (Bosnian and Serbian National Ballet companies, anyone?) and a great attitude Josh made the shoot great fun as we experimented with some more contemporary and less classical poses. Having shot poledance fairly solidly for a while now it was both a refreshing change and a challenge to be introduced to an entirely new vocabulary, as well as having the freedom to move around the entire backdrop!

I will never cease to be astonished by the power and grace of male dancers, to say that I’m envious would be a foolish understatement – it’s hard not to be impressed by what the human body is capable of when you push it to its limits.

We worked through some lighting setups with some new modifiers, and I did a little experimentation on backdrop texturing and replacement to explore the viability of those techniques on larger shoots.

I was shooting without an assistant which meant I was running off just the laptop in the peli site case, without the external monitor I’d normally use on larger pole groupshoots. The setup works really well for review and selection, and I’ve got plans to work on it further to make it even more flexible.

A really fun afternoon with some wonderfully dramatic results!

I arrived at flight and grabbed some behind the scenes shots of the prep while Kelly was hard at work, then set up to shoot the lyra  with Lauren in it. So far, so normal. We shot all the frames we needed on the hoop and Lauren disappeared off to the changing room for Kelly to start work on a second look for a different theme.  While they were changing up an idea started to crystallise, based on the ivy wreath that Lauren was wearing for the shoot.

It’d be cool, I thought, if we could make the hoop itself out of ivy, lending the shots something extraordinary and fitting in with the overall styling of the shoot. Obviously it was too late to do it in a single take, but it was going to be straightforward enough to composite, right ?

Wrong.

Turns out it’s really, really hard to find good stock imagery of ivy in a perfect hoop shape, lit appropriately, but instead of bailing out we just decided to do it the old fashioned way. Armed with a sack full of fake ivy (That Lauren happened to have laying around?!?) we bound up the hoop and shot it from the same positions under the same lighting, and then in what was to be Lauren’s most painful hoop shoot to date, grabbed some frames of her in the hoop wearing leggings , so that I could get some shadow data and some frames with hands and legs deforming the ivy.

From here it was a fairly simple masking job to bring the ivy into the shot and then just some toning and shadow work to sell the finished image!

Here’s a scroll-over Before & After of the finished work, you can see some of the minor adjustments to the dress and pose, as well as the compositing work on the Ivy hoop.

Naturally I took him up on it, but rather than just shoot them side-on as one might for a museum reference or stock piece I thought it would be interesting to do a single-take “Decomposition” shot. As these shotguns are fairly simple mechanically it turned out to be a lot easier than I was expecting, as there’s really not much to disassemble.

The trick of course was suspending all the parts by thin wire and fishing line so they could be shot in a single image and then have the wires cloned out in Photoshop. Due to the age and nature of the weapons we didn’t want to tear it down to the last so we left it at just the primary components, though I’m itching to back to a project like this and take it all the way to the nuts and bolts. Why upside down you might ask? Simple physics. The strap lugs and trigger guards presented an easy mounting point to hang them from, and meant there was very little cloning to do of wires across the gun bodies.

The shotgun in question here is a Lamber Over/Under 12 Gauge, with the rifle above being a Tikka M65 .308. Apparently.

After we were done with the exploded view, we also grabbed shots of the other rifles and put those together into a simple composite frame to show them off, an interesting challenge with some attractive results, one that I’m keen (oh wait for it) to have another (here it comes) shot at.

I’m so sorry.

The final composite of 3 Lorettas and 5 Rosies!

Those who know me know that I’ve never been a fan of arachnids. I wouldn’t go as far as to run screaming from the room, but there’s a certain irrational unease presented by any houseguest with 8 legs. So, when I was asked by the lovely Loretta Hope to shoot her in conjunction with Rosie, a Chilean Rose Tarantula, naturally my first reaction was to say “Yes”.

Go figure.

I didn’t want to shoot a typical “Nude with spider” shot, and figured if I was going to shoot a cliché I may as well go in with both feet. I shot Lola in 3 different positions to get her legs into place, using car keys and a spot of gaffer tape to make sure everything was lined up as necessary. Colin (Rosie’s handler) then coaxed out the terrifying beast beautiful Rosie who proceeded to take a VERY leisurely stroll around Lola’s back. So leisurely, in fact, that I wasn’t able to get an adequate number of photos of Rosie in position to complete the full “Jacket of Spiders” effect that I wanted but, c’est la vie, and we got enough to make it work.

Base Pose Base pose Base Pose Adding the Legs... Basic retouching and backdrop cleanup Sprinkle on some Spiders... Colour Grade Add some atmosphere!

You can see the composition process in the slides, cleaning up the background, adding the legs, retouching and shading, then comping in the spider(s) with a mix of masks and darken blend modes. A detail crop is below, as well as a 1:1 crop of the spider detail. Nikon D800’s don’t hide much that’s for sure!

Also, I must concede, I discovered that spiders (At least giant, loping hairy ones) aren’t quite as terrifying as I’d expected, so a pretty positive outcome all round!

After compositing the plates, the finished image, whilst achieving what we set out to accomplish, didn’t really hit home for me, so laid into it with Photoshop and  a boatload of fake fog and blood brushes to see where it would end up. I’ll do a full breakdown on that at some point in the retouching section, but for now, enjoy the slightly disturbing outcome!