today alisia and i went for a walk in a "sculpture park" near our apartment. during the walk i saw this big willow tree that i thought would make a good subject for a tim simmons style picture. so after dark we went back there and took a few pictures.
this picture is made of a lot of exposures from the same camera location. each time you take a picture, you move your light source (i'm using a 40" softbox). one problem you have to think through is focusing. you don't want each picture to have a different focus, otherwise it'll look..... odd when you stack them all together. my solution was to bring a small flashlight, and have alisia shine it on herself while i zoomed in on her and let the camera autofocus. then i switched to manual focus and zoomed back out.
another problem to think about ahead of time is how things are going to stack up..... i'm doing this in photoshop with layers all set to "lighten". that means if an area of my current layer is darker than what's below it in the stack, it's going to show the other layers through.
so if your subject is wearing black, or dark colors.... that's not going to work so well. here i had a problem with alisia's jeans being too dark. i wound up cutting out a jeans shaped patch from one layer and making it opaque in order to not have grass showing through her lower legs.
a third problem to think about is movement in your picture. if anything moves between shots, then you're going to have at best a weird doubling effect, and at worst a quadrupling or more. if you look at this picture closely, you can see that most of the leaves were moving in the breeze. so there's a lot of doubling going on. if it bothered me i could get in there in photoshop and mask out every other leaf.... but i'm not going to get that crazy.
there are other things to consider with this type of shot, but i've revealed too many of my moves already. i think it looks cool, and that's really all that matters.
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