Lauren, Kelly, Crystal Balls and Fake Ivy

Lauren got in touch to say that she wanted to do a fairy themed shoot in the hoop with a crystal ball, and had enlisted the help of her super talented friend Kelly Odell for the makeup and styling.

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.