Fine Art Festive Photo: Winter Portraits in the Studio with Gavin Hoey

January 8, 2019

In this episode the prolific photographer Gavin Hoey with Adorama TV is going to share this awesome Festive Stars background and his method of how to create Fine Art Portrait with a festive feel!!

To set the theme of the photograph Gavin uses a pre-made background with a big star in the middle of the screen with lots of small stars above it. The model will be looking up at the stars in the photo. David continues: “… the only problem is, this is the only star I’ve got, so this is going to do a lot of work and there will be a bit of post-processing involved. Now to make the post-processing a lot easier, I’m going to go with a black back ground…

… and then I need to light the star. Now I could use absolutely any sort of lighting for this. I’m going to go with the specular LEDs but anything will work because all I need is a nice flat image of the star. Now if you’re going to use LED lighting and aperture priority mode. Just make sure you adjust your exposure compensation probably -2, in my case to make sure that black background is genuinely deep perfect black.”

This composition will consist of two types of stars – the center, well lit star; and secondary cloned small stars.

David continues: “My second star photo needs a bit of logical thinking because there’s going to be a bright star in the middle, lighting the ones along the top, so I need to light this star as if it was lit from something below and in the center, so that means getting my light source and getting it lowered down so I have light coming up from underneath…

… what I need to do with this is just give it a little spin, just a gentle spin and as it comes around to me and squares up to me then I can hit the shutter and get my shot.

With these two versions of star we can successfully create our festive background in Adobe Photoshop. Luckily for you Mr. Hoey has already created a pretty neat template for that with lots of room for creative freedom.

Once the template is ready, we can bring in the model, in Gavin’s case the amazing Lauren!

For this light setup Gavin uses eVOLV 200 with a small Diffuser Dome on it. David continues: “Diffusing dome does a couple of things; it’s smooth the light, gives a lot more even light and it mimics the light from the star in the background. You could do this with just the bare bulb but it’s much more comfy for the models to have a slightly bigger light source like the Diffusing Dome to look at.”

“Now the whole thing is on a boom arm and if you’re going to use a boom arm, you need to take safety into account, so I’ve got a sandbag at the bottom, a sandbag at the end and that should mean, it’s nice and balanced so it doesn’t sort of suddenly drop down. “

Now, let’s see what would be the best position for the model to take for the final photo.

Mr. Hoey examines – “If Lauren looks towards me, it doesn’t really work because we only have one light in this shot, it’s from above and it’s not going to light Lauren’s face unless she looks towards the light.

And when she does that works really well.

“At the moment the eVOLV 200 is right up against the background and although that works, it is quite shadowy on Lauren’s face at least on the side that I can see from the camera position. Now to get around that, I’m going to move the light ever so slightly further away from the background and that should put a little bit more light on the side of Lauren that I can actually see and that works really well. “

Gavin continues: “I’m really happy how this is looking but there’s one last thing we can do just to refine the position that Lauren looks at, so if I asked Lauren to look towards the light, it could be quite uncomfortable, I’m actually going to ask her to look just slightly past the light which is a little bit more comfortable for the models point of view.”

“When Lauren does that and I go in close looking at her eye, I can see that the eye is really white and that is not the look I want. If I ask Lauren just to look in front and the other side of the light, I can actually see her eye in the shot and that looks way better so when I’m asking Lauren to look around, I’m always going to ask her to look just in front of the light.

Now it is time to take some pictures! Notice that the model is positioned against grey background, which is really important and will help a lot during processing photo in Photoshop.

After taking several images it is time to fuse our pre-made background and photos with the model together. To do that let’s drag the photo with the model onto the Gavin’s star project.

After proper sizing ( command + T (Mac) for size manipulation) we have Lauren positioned right under stars, as we wanted. Let’s stretch the edges of the imported photo so it will nicely cover whole background. Select edges of the photo, press command+T and start stretching the outer side towards the edge of the canvas.

Once we have the whole canvas covered up, it is time to blend the photo in. Go to Layer -> layer mask -> hide all.

Gavin continues: “Now this seems really weird because when you click on it, all of that work disappears and what we get is a black rectangle next to the layer. That’s a layer mask and I can bring Lauren back in just a few areas by getting the paintbrush tool, making sure my brush color is white, with a big and soft brush, I can just click and paint and bring Lauren back through and I end up with that nice vignetted look as well. “

Try experimenting more with Gavin’s template to get colder – warmer, more pronounced/dramatic looks!

WANT TO LEARN PHOTOGRAPHY?

Check out our WORKSHOPS in Los Angeles that teach you hands-on how to make great photos!

One of our closest workshops – Studio Lighting 101 : Introduction to Studio Lighting and 3-Light Set Up

will take place on January 9th, 7-9pm, in one of our Los Angeles studios !!!

Watch the full episode with Gavin Hoey and Adorama TV:

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Fine Art Festive Photo: Winter Portraits in the Studio with Gavin Hoey

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