We had great fun setting up and taking this shot. There is about 37 feet between the foreground Mary and background Mary (to create the perspective). I used a 30 second exposure in complete darkness exposing Mary with flash. Here were the steps:
1. Set camera on tripod and focus on Mary in the foreground.
2. Turn out all lights and open camera shutter.
3. Pop flash to expose Mary (note, don't let back flash sync or you get background exposure leaking through to foreground)
4. Cover front of lens so no light comes in, turn on lights so Mary could run to the other end of the house and stand on pre positioned chair (lined up with her shoulder from foreground).
5. Mary stands on chair and pretends to whisper in her ear.
6. All lights back off.
7. Manually focus lens to infinity so "back" Mary will be in focus. Shot at f16 iso 400 with 30mm lens.
7. Remove lens covering.
8. Pop back flash on Mary.
9. Cover lens again for the rest of the 30s exposure.
10. Repeat many times and pay the kids to keep trying because they get bored with it :)
Editing steps:
1. Convert from RAW in ACR.
2. Crop
3. add curves layer and adjust Red, Green and blue channels (trying to get rid of color cast in eyes).
4. add Hue/Sat Layer and adjust Reds, Yellows, Blues, and Magentas to fix white balance on back Mary. (back flash was considerable cooler than front flash)
5. added bright/contrast layer to adjust contrast
6. Added another curves layer to fine tune contrast
7. Run through neatimage to fix noise
8. Sharpen, reduce and save for web.
Statistics
Place: 1 out of 143 Avg (all users): 7.1441 Avg (commenters): 8.8571 Avg (participants): 7.0500 Avg (non-participants): 7.1761 Views since voting: 8754 Views during voting: 559 Votes: 236 Comments: 52 Favorites: 17 (view)
Congrats on your ribbon, and thanks for your generosity in sharing your methods so explicitly. Kudos to your daughter; her expression is adorable -- quite the little actress. Cheers,
This is indeed the winner because the image rises above the challenge. The overall effect is truly arresting and the concept to isolate the images, that is, no blending of the images, retains the integrity of a razor sharp main image. You have my admiration and Congratulations!
Conscience Decisions
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