18-55mm DX Kit Lens – Sloth Shots

So this is probably the most photoshopping I’ve ever done, the floating Pam I’m still not 100% happy with but I’ve done as much as I can.

So, first picture:
Nikon D5100
18-55mm Kit Lens @ 20mm
ISO 100
f/3.8
SS 5 sec

This was Pam on the bed (the Dreamer), layer duplicated, blurred and then a layer mask with reflected gradient pulled in the Pam in focus from the original layer to give a false depth of field I couldn’t get with the lens.

Lighting her was difficult as both my speedlite and ring flash were too bright and harsh, so I ended up using a bicycle light, through a popup flash diffuser and a toilet roll tube to shape the light, all covered in a carrier bag to stop too much light getting out.

Gradient layer mask used to blend the night sky in:

D5100
35mm Prime Lens
ISO 100
f/1.8
SS 10 sec

Lots of exposure correction in ‘shop to get the detail, the original image was pretty much black – the 10 second exposure gives a little nice movement to the stars to give them an extra ‘odd’ quality to detract from reality.

D5100
18-55mm Kit Lens @ 22mm
ISO 100
f/4
SS 1/6 sec

Final ‘foaty Pam’ (the Dream) was shot on my TV stand (having cleared it of the Amp, speakers, WiiU control bar and my Lego Star Wars spaceships), I threw a sheet over the back to help separate her in photoshop later and some Christmas tree lights to add some extra odd lighting to her body (as well as full illumination with my ring flash to contrast the sleeping lighting below).

In photoshop I duplicated her layer and added a lot of diffuse glow (like, a lot) and then did a gradient layer mask to pull through only a little on the top half of the image. Magnetic selection tool to pick out around the body, feathered 20 pixels to give them a see through quality (to make her a little otherworldly) and then when I pasted the layer into the final image I drop the layer opacity 10% to help. Pam helped out with some directions on getting the image to match in better (colour adjustments and cloning some of the hair out).

Overall desaturated the image (as Iron Maiden said, “You only dream in black and white“) and then resized down from 4464 pixels square to best with the internet.

Originally I wanted to shoot ‘the Dream’ underwater but that didn’t work out well, only waterproof camera I had was my mobile and it was terrible – plus our apartments pool is quite murky with chlorine (well, I hope it’s because of the chlorine) and to top it all off I think I nearly drowned her, so thought best to take a different stab at the floating image..

In hindsight I’d’ve probably tried to reproduce the camera settings and use a custom white balance for the two pictures to try and better merge them. I thought using bold light on the dream vs the dreamer would be a good effect but now looking at it the harsh light just extenuates the fact she’s pasted in.

Now I’m not normally one to shoot in black and white; there’s just something about b+w shots that look pretentious in the modern age, it’s like “ooh, look, I’m an artist as I shoot in black and white” – now don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of great artists shooting predominately in black and white and their pictures look awesome, but us enthusiasts? So unless the brief fits it, or it improves what I’m trying to do with the picture, it’s going to be in colour.

Even for this shot, personally I prefer the one on the left here as it looks closer to what I had in my mind when I pictured it, again though, for the brief I thought B&W would make more sense.