Phototography Tutorial - The 'Doves' Photo

All text and images copyright Titus Powell. Do not reproduce without permission.

Introduction

Almost everyone owns a digital camera these days. Photography is fun, and inspiring, and we'd all like to be better at it. There are hundreds of 'how-to' books on photography, and most aspiring photographers own a few, but those books are always missing something. They only give us pieces of the puzzle. They don't give you an insight into how a professional photographer thinks, how he or she plans an idea and develops it right through to the finished image.

People are often asking to assist on one of my shoots, or for me to explain how I achieved a particular image. So this tutorial is designed to give you an overview of my entire thinking process that went into a particular image, and the various tricks and techniques I employed along the way to achieve it. By seeing how I approached each stage, I hope you will be inspired to do something similar, and realise that it's easier than you'd think.

For this tutorial, I'm going to focus on my 'Doves' photo, and take you through every step of the process. I hope you find it useful.

The Original Idea

It's great if you have a visionary idea for a photo before starting out, but that's not always possible - or necessary. The original idea for the Doves photo was just to photograph this skirt:

The model is a friend I've worked with once before, and we were discussing doing another shoot together. While we were thinking of ideas, she mentioned she had an interesting skirt with a mermaid shape. She sent me a camera-phone picture and I thought it was unusual enough to have potential.

Finding a Model

Before I get onto how I developed the idea of the skirt, it's worth saying a little bit about finding a model. There are lots of types of photography that don't use models, and everyone who buys a camera goes through a learning phase where they experiment with landscapes and flowers and artistic photos of their cat. I'm not knocking these things, and I learned a lot from doing it myself; however for me and a lot of other photographers, what's rewarding is working with people. Photographing people brings all sorts of new challenges - persuading them to work with you, making them feel comfortable, posing them, etc. - but ultimately that's what keeps photography interesting and fun.

So a few words on getting yourself a model. There's an upward spiral you'll notice if you get into working with models: the better your portfolio gets, the better models you'll be able to get to work with you, and the better the models, the better your portfolio will get. It takes time, so don't get put off if Kate Moss isn't kicking down your door to work with you right away. Work with everyone who will let you point a camera at them until your portfolio attracts more and more photogenic models!

www.modelmayhem.com is a great free resource for models and photographers to find each other. If you don't know any models and want to hire one, you'll find plenty available there. Many up-and-coming models will also work 'Time For Prints', meaning no one gets paid and you both get a copy of the photos for your portfolio (i.e. you give the model a CD of the images a few days after the shoot). As your portfolio develops, you'll get more and more models wanting to work on a TFP basis, and you'll be able to be more selective. In the early days if you don't have much experience, you'll probably only get beginner models willing to collaborate, unless of course you're happy hiring a more experience one, but that's fine; the experience will be good for both of you.

Developing the Idea

Back to the skirt. I wanted the skirt to have as much impact as possible, so I opted to have the model wearing nothing on her top half. You see this a lot in fashion photos - if the image is to sell a handbag, or a piece of jewellery or perfume, the model wears only that item. This is partly to make it sexier of course, but also to highlight the main item more. Of course if there's too much nudity then there's a risk of that distracting attention away from the item you're trying to show off. That's why the 'implied' nudity style is used a lot in adverts and fashion magazines.

The necklace was one the model brought; we added it because it was unobtrusive and the heart shape seemed like it would go with the look.

Nudity

A quick aside on the subject of nudity as there is implied nudity in the Doves photo: you need to make sure that your model is completely comfortable with your idea, and that if it involves any sort of nudity it will be tasteful and benefit the overall image. The model's comfort during the shoot must be one of your top concerns - if not, her discomfort will show in the pictures and put off other people wanting to work with you.

For my Doves photo, the model was very comfortable with her body and we'd worked together before so she was also comfortable working with me. We tried versions of the image both with hair covering her chest (as in the final picture) and without, and I opted for the covered version as I didn't want the main focus of the photo to be her body.

If you're doing a photo with implied nudity such as this one, it's important that the model isn't right on the edge of what she's comfortable with, or she'll spend the whole shoot focused on not showing too much rather than on creating great photos with you.

Lighting

Lighting is KEY to the atmosphere and 'feel' of any image. And if you want proof, look at this:

This is the first test shot I did during the shoot, and as you can see, the lighting is flat and horrible.

I liked the idea of having the model hold her arms out in an almost religious pose, so to make that work the lighting needed to match. For that religious feel I decided to have the light coming down from above.

Here are a couple of other photos I took while moving the lights around to achieve the effect I wanted:

The final lighting that I was more or less happy with was a softbox placed above the model's head. I positioned her about six feet in front of the paper backdrop so that only a minimum of light fell on it. This makes the backdrop look dark grey, even though it was actually white - the light is just falling on the model.

Posing the Model

So the lighting looked good and I already had the basic pose I wanted. But details are what make or break a photo, so at this point I reviewed each element and looked for ways to improve it. First I made sure her head was angled upwards so that her face wasn't in shadow. Then I experimented with different positions of her hands, till I came up with the 'index finger extended' position that I thought suited the religious vibe I was now going for. Lastly I wanted to emphasise the 'mermaid' shape of the skirt, so I had her position her knees close together and flared out the bottom of the skirt to get that hourglass shape. She is a dancer, so could stand on tiptoe to elongate the bottom of the skirt, which also helped with that shape.

Here is the 'posed' version of the photo, and the actual one used before retouching:

Retouching

So at this point I had a photo that I quite liked and was ready for some post processing. Note that the doves were not part of the original idea and I hadn't even thought of them at this stage.

I currently use Adobe Photoshop 7, which is at least three versions out of date, so if you have any of the Photoshop CS versions, you'll be able to do everything I do and then some! It's beyond the scope of this tutorial to describe specific Photoshop techniques, but I'll tell you which tools I used. Anything I describe here you should be able to figure out with a little experimenting. Needless to say, always makeup a backup copy of a photo before you begin retouching, in case it all goes horribly wrong!

First I used the Clone Stamp tool and the Healing Brush tool to get rid of the curled up paper at the bottom of the image and the corner of lighting stand in the bottom left. With a bigger studio, neither of these should have been visible in the first place but the space in my studio is limited, especially as the model was standing six feet forward from the backdrop to achieve the lighting effect.

Next I improved the brightness of the image (using Image menu... Adjustments... Levels).

Then I used the Healing Brush tool to remove blemishes on her skin and on the background paper.

I then smoothed her skin, which is done by making a duplicate layer, blurring it, and painting on a layer mask with the Brush tool so that the blurred areas show on areas of skin, and the original image shows everywhere else. This creates an excessive 'plastic doll' look, but if you drop the opacity of the blurred layer to about 30%, you get a nice combination of skin detail and smoothing.

Then I used the Dodge tool to selectively brighten the lower half of the skirt, as it was quite shadowy and I wanted more detail to show. (Whenever you apply this or any other tool and the effect is too strong, use Edit menu... Fade... which is incredibly useful.)

Finally I used the Liquify tool (Filter menu... Liquify) to squeeze in the narrow part of the skirt to make it even narrower. This gives it a more dramatic shape.

The retouched image now looked like this:

Playing with Light

So far so good, but I wanted to give even more of an impression of light coming down from above, so I used the Dodge tool to brighten the background near her head to create a ray of light coming down from above and to give her a halo effect. Working with Layers, Layer Masks and Fade let you do this sort of thing more precisely.

Then I added a subtle vignette (making it darker around the edges and corners), which is done by creating a black layer, adding a mask so that the black is just at the edges of the image, and then applying a Gaussian Blur to the mask so that the effect is gradual. Lastly you drop the opacity of the black layer so that the effect doesn't draw attention to itself.

Stretching the Skirt

Next I wanted to make the skirt even more striking so I decided to stretch it. Compare the unstretched image above to that below - it's longer. I did this by making a copy of the image and stretching it vertically (Image menu... Canvas Size). Then I selected the top half of the original image and pasted it into the stretched copy, so that from the waist up the image was normal, and from the waste down it was stretched. Then, fiddling around with Layer Masks and the Brush tool, I blended the join to make it seamless.

Now she appears to have improbably long legs, but the image is definitely more eye-catching:

The composition now looked slightly cramped, however, so I added more space at the top of the image using the same stretching trick, this time stretching just the space above her head. Now there's more room above her and the overall composition looks better:

Adding Doves

So at this point I was happy with the picture but still felt something was missing. I wanted to make it really dramatic. While wondering what else I could do to it, an idea struck me - it would add to the religious feel to have some doves flying through the air.

At this point I could have headed for Google and searched for other people's dove images to pinch. But this is not only dishonest, it would have inevitably come back to haunt me. So instead I went to an image stock library (I used www.bigstockphoto.com) and searched for doves. You can purchase images to use of almost anything there, very cheaply. I think the two doves cost me a total of 3 pounds ($6), and that got me royalty free usage - I can do what I like with them.

The key to merging different photos into one is to get the lighting to match - if it doesn't, the result will look fake, no matter how skilfully you blend them. I knew that if I was going to add doves into the picture they would have to be lit from above to match my lighting in the photo - and this was likely because in the natural world things are often lit from above (the sun).

I also knew that to make merging the doves into the photo much easier, it would help enormously if the background contrasted with the doves, ideally being black because doves are white. Doves against a white background would be a nightmare to blend in convincingly.

So I was looking for photos of two doves, lit from above, with a black background. As luck would have it, I found exactly what I was looking for on www.bigstockphoto.com, and happily bought the right to use them:

I then had fun trying the doves in different positions, and transformed their size to look realistic in the image using Edit menu... Transform... Scale. Originally I was going to have them both in the air near her shoulders but I realised that one of the doves looked like it was settling on something, and that the image would look more realistic if the dove was directly touching the model's hand, because it would look like they're interacting. So I positioned the layer with that dove as if it had just landed on her hand (which also involved rotating it slightly to get the angle right).

After that it was just a matter of blending them in convincingly. One route is to carefully make a selection around the object (dove), copy it and paste it into the main image. But since I had a black background there was an easier option, using 'Layer Blending'. I pasted each dove into the main image, square black background and all, and then selected Blending Options on each dove layer. By playing with the sliders there, I got the black areas to go invisible, leaving just the white doves over the main image.

After this the touching dove and hand looked like this:

Notice the dove's eye and claws have disappeared due to the layer blending, because they were darker than the rest of the dove and thus got removed with the black background. But by copying and pasting parts of the original dove over the top, it was easy enough to bring them back.

At this point I was almost there but there was a subtle problem - if the dove was real, it would cast a shadow on her hand where it was blocking the light. But by using the Burn tool to darken her thumb and the edge of her hand, I managed to create the illusion of a shadow:

Similarly, I used the Burn tool to slightly darken the air under the dove on the right, again to give the impression it is blocking some of the light and thus is really there.

And then the image was complete: