It took a while but today we finally had time to go to the woods and start on part two of “Paint your dreams”. A little project I do with my six year old daughter. We think of scenes where we can combine a photo of the scenery with a kids drawing. We did this a while ago (see other images in the gallery) For today we picked the theme animals. At first we started the think of situations where animals were hiding on a funny way (see the giraffe). We came up with many other scenes but Nicki still needs to make the drawings for those so that can take a while (We don’t want to rush the creative process do we.) While we were hiking through the forest there were some small puddles due to the rain of the day before and we came up with the idea to start fishing and looking for sharks. Officially the fishing photo is not painted by her, and she is not using her paint brush, but it did fit the rest of the series. With the shark photo we had a lot of fun while we took the picture and even more when she started to make the kids drawing. Nicki was pleasantly surprised by the idea that she could get this result by just painting a small triangle. You’ve got to love the way kids think. Finally we went to a small meadow with a bit of water, because we were walking around the whole time with the idea to do this with a whale. Unfortunately all the waters were too small for a whale. Even for a fantasy whale. But at the end we did find the right spot. I do hope you line the idea and if you have suggestions please […]

Marcia shot a few photos of her son Noah. And we came to the idea to use these for a tattoo make-over. Both shots had the perfect pose for a though boy with a tattoo. So I tried the little tattoo trick again in Photoshop. If I find the time I will write a tutorial on it. I probably went a bit over the top with the back piece but that is the whole idea of this series. Un realistic tattoo situations… Don’t be surprised if more will follow soon.

First rule of fight club is…. I found a nice tutorial on how to make dripping blood with Adobe Photoshop. Had a plan with a photo of my 5 year old daughter and halloween. When I was done it looked so realistic that after a short discussion with my wife we decided it was not fit to be put on the world wide web. So at the end I ended up with photoshopping a self portrait. Maybe I can convince my wife i can do a portrait of her as well.

New shoot in the Nicki Staged series. This time we worked with the antique gramophone player. I was struggling with the light during this shoot because the horn is made of shining brass and again I needed to light two faces. I have done a lot of additional work in Lightroom and Photoshop to get to this result. And it seems that I am already getting the right setting. I managed to get the same tone as in the previous shoot. We also played a bit with additional props this time. The next shot we made with a stethoscope, and Nickita loved it to listen to the mechanism inside. I was hoping the that the combination of sound and stethoscope would work nice together. Everything was lit with a small flash, a studio head with grid and a regular studio head. For the final shot I was looking for the combination between old and new. And closing the generation gap. Nicki was actually asking me when we could play her CD. At the end she came to the conclusion that this was not possible because the hole in the center of her CD was too large for the pin on the gramophoneplayer – how sweet. Curious about the next shoot? Come back once in a while and I will keep you posted.

We have been working on a new series. The whole idea is to set staged situations between father and daughter. So the first one is staging a poker game between father and daughter. It’s still undecided who is the winner. In the first photo dad is the big loser and in the second photo dad wins all the money, even all the college money was at stake. Please let me know which one is your favorite. To see the other photos, please visite the gallery.

The first shoot where I tried the floating concept (or should I say hovering?). My daughter and I had a lot of fun creating these trick photography photo’s. Wondering how we did it? – just place your mouse over the large image to see the un-edited version. After shooting we went straight home (to warm up and) to see the result. After a few tweaks in Adobe Lightroom we were both satisfied with the end result. The whole idea is that you support your subject with something that  distincts from its surroundings, so in my case the green stool. This can be easily removed in an image editing program like Adobe Photoshop. Make sure you place your camera on a tripod and make the shot. Then remove the subject and the stool without altering the rest. So in the above example we needed to be careful not to leave footprints in the snow or bump against the sled. Take a second shot (without the little lady and stool) and in Photoshop you load both photos. Place the one with the subject in it on top of the other. Use your favorite tool to remove (erase) the green stool from the top image. And as if it’s magic you will see it disappear. (In other words the image in the back will show where the stool was. And because you used a tripod it will not differ from the top image. In my case I was careless and I needed also the remove the pulling rope which was tied to the sled. As you can notice I also had to created (draw) the missing parts of the black pants of Nicki otherwise her legs wouldn’t look natural. To top it off I also extended the scarf, and added shadow on the […]