The Concept: This image represents a won battle between hope against depression. An awesome testimony of a young athlete that had to depart from his promising dream due to health issues. Thanks to Jesus Christ he found a new joy. To share the good news through music
Above is the final product for an album cover. Below are the ingredients and steps for the composite image. This process is pretty simple, but you will need a few things concerning gear and technique:
- tripod
- 8-stop neutral density filter
- flash
- shoot in manual mode, including manual white balance
- shoot using a timer, remote or with a cable release
For the first shot, start by framing the scene. Make sure you pre-focus the camera and mark the location of your focal plane. Place your talent and take the first shot depending on what your concept is, but make sure the camera does not move at all.
In the second shot, to enhance the concept, I wanted to capture a little motion blur for a ghosting effect...That is where the 8-stop neutral density filter came into play–and this is why: In order to get the motion blur as your talent walks slowly across the frame, you will need to slow down the shutter to about a two second exposure. The main idea is to use your reciprocals with the ND filter by capturing the image with the same exposure, but without changing the aperture. Remember, you need to be shooting in manual mode, otherwise your other settings will fluctuate. You will also end up with a slight color shift, but you can work around it in Photoshop.
For the third and final shot, I needed the face to be in focus to merge with the previous motion shot. If you don't have a powerful enough strobe, you'll have to take this third shot with a flash to expose your talent's face without blur. It is possible to capture both the motion and sharpness in one shot, however, with our limited time frame shooting around noon, the lighting was too bright to get these dual looks together. So, in your case, if it is either dark enough or if you do have a powerful strobe you can actually skip the third shot by using rear curtain sync and dragging the shutter for the "ghosting effect" with "sharp face" shot. The dragging of the shutter allows motion, while the strobe freezes the motion at the last second of the exposure by either matching or overpowering the ambient lighting.
So now you have the images that you need for the composite. And since you stayed in manual mode, manually white balanced your shots, and did not move your camera (thanks to your sturdy tripod) the only thing you will need to do is to align the images as layers in Photoshop and mask them accordingly.
I hope this gives you an idea for a personal project. Just think anything with motion–drop, crash, jump etc.
