Emma called me, "Hey, I have this really cool idea for a shot for May the 4th. I'm dressed in motorcycle gear but I'm riding an
Eopie".
Well it sounded a little off the wall so how could I not say yes! Emma owns and runs Motorbike Rentals & Alternative Adventures - Hopkins, Belize, and I often collaborate with her on photoshoots. Emma would be the model — not a problem. The shoot would be on a beach location — not a problem. And we need a full-sized Eopie from Star Wars — hmm.
After scouring the inter-webs we found that good old eBay had a supply of the creatures, but they were only 3 inches tall. If you've worked with me on anything creative you'll know immediately that size really doesn't matter. What was concerning though was getting the Eopie delivered to Belize in time for me to shoot it and have the image ready to go live on May 4th. Again, Emma reached out through her business connections and found someone who would be in Belize on May 1st, and be willing to pick up the Eopie and bring it with them on their journey here.
On Friday April 28th, we begin shooting other elements for the final image.
For the background we agreed that a glowing sunrise would be nice. On shoot day we waited 40 minutes from sunrise for the sun to be high enough to be seen above the humidity and dust blowing in from the Sahara desert. But when we saw it we liked it. Originally we were going to include palm trees and more beach for the Belize 'twist ' in the composition, but with the light and colour like this we moved to the edge of the beach for a more minimal background. Emma was in the shot for a sense of scale that I could refer to later on when compositing the final image. As things would go, I liked the shot with Emma in the frame better than the shots I took of her not in frame so I decided to use this shot anyway and retouched her out of the picture.
On May 1st Eopie arrived from it's journey across North America to Central America and so at last I could begin work on this central character.
Once the Eopie is shot, the reigns will need adjusting slightly and the red items at the back of its neck need to be removed. It's May 2nd now so time to make this 3 inch high toy into a full-sized creature that can comfortably carry Emma and her motorcycle luggage.
Because the toy is so small and we want it to appear large it's difficult to get the whole image in good focus. If I focus on the eye then the back will be too out of focus and vice versa. To get around this, I used a technique known as '
focus stacking'. This is when you shoot an object on the same plane as your lens but you shift the point of focus each time and then you blend all the shots together using software to create one final image. Here you can see my first shot (A) focussed on the back feet. My second shot (B) was to capture the middle area of the Eopie, and my final shot (C) was for the eye and head. You can use more shots to get more overall sharpness but this was fine for my needs. It was time to shoot the other star of the show now.
We put Emma on one of her bikes with the bike luggage in place. I used mostly ambient light but also used a white reflector on the ground. This was mainly to stop the lower areas of her leg going into too much shadow and also to neutralize some of the green colour that would have been absorbed into her pants from the colour of the grass.
So now we had all the shots, all I had to do was extract Emma and Eopie from their respective backgrounds and comp the final image together. And no, there are not really two suns visible in the Belize sky, but we put it in as another nod to a scene from the Star Wars movies.
And with a little retouching to add the light sabre and saddle, and a little tidying up here and there,
Comments
Post a Comment