anatomy of a photo // dream state

I used to think that I needed to have a clear, concise concept before making an image; that I had to know what my intent was before pressing the shutter. And if I didn't, I felt like a failure and not much of an artist. But now I realize that's kind of backwards for me. This image is an example of how I decided, weeks after taking the original photos, to experiment with two of them in post-processing just to see where it would take me.

So I'm gonna break down how this image came about. I'm not going to explain all the nitty-gritty step-by-step details, because this isn't a tutorial. Just a glimpse at my process, if you will.

I used two photos to make this, and here's the first I used. I shot this at a friend's studio where she works (actually, this was an empty room right next to the studio), and we were both just messing around with our cameras, doing whatever came to mind with whatever props were available. At the time, I was thinking, "hey I'll try a levitation-type photo." So my friend Kristina pressed the shutter for me, while I gave my core a serious workout with all the balancing and faux-levitating. We had a strobe setup camera left, and I took like 30 shots of me in various positions.

And here's another photo I took in that room about half an hour later, completely unrelated to that other photo. Kristina was using this fishbowl as a prop for her own photo, and while she was at her camera checking the images, I shot this super fast and without any thought. Natural light. I really just wanted to document what was going on.

So fast-forward a couple weeks. I had given up on my initial levitation-over-a-pillow idea, because it just wasn't coming together in Photoshop like I wanted. Something was off. I was looking over the entire batch of photos from that day, and when I noticed my lone fishbowl photo, I decided to paste one of my levitation shots onto it to see what happened.

Here's what it looked like after selecting, copying, pasting, resizing, rotating, and some layer masking of my "self" onto the fishbowl image. This was the most tedious part. I thought about placing myself in the actual fishbowl, but changed my mind. I liked this composition better.

Notice that I changed the hair a bit. I wanted to add some length and just make it more...present, I guess. I used some brushes that I downloaded forever ago to add the hair and tried to blend it with my actual hair the best I could. I did a bit more blending and touching up to the hair later on in my editing. And I'll admit something: I actually hate using these types of brushes on my images, but since I don't have long, luxurious, model-worthy locks, I felt it would be okay.

If there's one thing I can decide on right away, it's how I want to crop the image. I always do this first, before I start the nitty-gritty editing. I figure it's also less work for Photoshop do to, since there's fewer pixels to deal with? You're welcome, Photoshop. I'm always lookin out for ya.

Now the fun part begins! This is the stage of editing I call "experiment-with-colors-levels-and-curves-until-something-clicks." That is literally what I do. I just try different things until I see something I like, and matches how I feel about the image. I was definitely striving for some kind of lightness or airiness....a subtle dreaminess. 

I love me some color curve adjustments. Here's a screenshot while I was messing around with the blue color channel. It was pretty much at this point that I knew this was what it was supposed to look like. It "matched" what I was feeling. I made a few more adjustments with brightness, contrast, and sharpening. 

Oh! I forgot to mention earlier that I did some Gaussian blurring to my body portion of the photo, to help match the shallow depth of field of the fishbowl photo. It's a subtle detail, but an important one, considering I shot the photos with two completely different apertures.

So, yep. That was pretty much my thought process behind making this image. Not too ground-breaking, I know, but I always enjoy reading how other photographers create something from scratch. And what's the point of a blog if you're not sharing?