January Blues

In the Castle Commons

Well, December was a bust for shooting. It was great for family time and Christmas Day itself was quite fun, but between bad weather and sickness both my planned shoots simply couldn't happen. First, Shawna had a sick child and had to cancel, then I had sick grandkids and had to cancel, then I got sick and really didn't get any better until right before Christmas Day. But....

In January, Floofie and I managed to schedule a shoot at her garage studio. She had had a green screen set up for a video project she had been working on with her husband, so I thought that would be a great opportunity to do some shots for compositing. With that idea in mind, I began putting together the concepts I wanted to shoot. 

One idea was to bring some holiday outfits with me to shoot my Xmas pinups, and so I gathered a few costumes for that. I also had an idea for a new project that I call "In Black." The concept for that was instead of posing the model against a black background, I would pose the models in black outfits of vinyl, leather, lace, or spandex. With a green screen background, it would then be easy to extract the subject from the backdrop and place her against a different scene. 

Xmas Fun

I had done some compositing in the past and it was something of a tedious process, but with the latest updates of Photoshop and Lightroom, subject selection had become easier with AI automation. And, indeed, subject selection has become easier, but subject selection and background removal is only part of the process. I soon learned that, while green screens and blue screens are great for video production, the same is not true for still photography. The problem occurs due to color contamination from the background onto the model's skin. The green cast from the screen had to be removed and I had to learn several different techniques to accomplish it. Learning new techniques is always fun, so I enjoyed the process and I think I created a couple of fun composites from the images I worked on. I've only created a couple of composites so far, but I think they look pretty good.