In my very first blog post on this blog, about five weeks ago I mentioned an idea I had kicking around, about taking a picture showing someone removing a neutral face mask to reveal a more authentic expression on a face below. This is the final image from that idea.
How it came to be:
Shooting this was pretty simple. I knew I wanted a lot of detail in the shadow areas, so I used a ring flash at low power to get some light into all parts of the image. A high powered beauty dish above the subject and camera allowed me to really sculpt with light while not worrying about the shadows since the ring was taking care of those areas. Two rimlights to push in those dynamic edges, each one in a 24″ softbox, and one gridded light on the background to get a gradient happening back there. So your basic 5 light setup, with the rimlights at a fairly low power to accent things without overwhelming them. Medium depth of field (I think this was at f5.6 or so) in order to have a lot of detail to work with in editing.
Compositing things together was more difficult. I had shot two images, one with my looking up for the “mask” part, and the other with me holding a cut up paper plate over my head, to get the hand angle right and cast the appropriate shadow on my “revealed” face. Most of the tricky parts of compositing involved creating realistically cast shadows on different areas. I wanted to draw attention to the lower face, so I put a bit more contrast on it than on the “mask” face, and did some subtle lighting effects to pull the viewer’s eye to it. The mask face still looked too lively, even with slightly lowered contrast, so I went in and removed the catchlight from it’s eye. That went a long way to making it appear more lifeless and neutral. The last thing I did was add a layer with some smoke on it to the background, which really helped to put this in more of a sci-fi mindset, instead of a more realistic setting.
This is for me a good example of what I want to do more of…. come up with an idea, and then execute it, making decisions along the way based on whether or not the choice supports the main idea or not. I’m pleased with how it came out, and I think it expresses the core concept quite well.
Mask Idea Completed
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