Making of: Spines to rest your spine

A little bit of background...

So, I had the best weekend of my life. Not only did I get to photograph Maroon 5 at legendary Abbey Road Studios on Saturday (photos to come later! :D) but on Friday, I had the most fun-filled day, with the most interesting, fascinating, colourful person I have ever met. And he's what inspired this picture.

Monkeyboy:

Okay, so the shot itself:

First off, it was raining. Heavily! Don't let it put you off!
I put my coat over my camera on tripod, and took about 10-15books with me into the woods.


I took around 30 images of books in 2s, 3s and 4s, each of them getting higher and higher in an arc like shape to be blended together later.



apologies for the next photo, it's not as weird as it looks. what i'm doing here is placing a book under each section of my body that is going to be resting on a book later on. this way the shadows and folds on the material/my face/hair are as natural as possible and will blend in well and look realistic. I'm pulling a strange face because you never know which face pic you'll end up using... it wasn't this one :P



Then I got some shots balancing on a branch of my feet and legs above ground. Because I was on my own and it was wet and cold there's no oppurtunity to do any real "levitiation" methods, because no one was about to hold me up and the branch was all I had to work with. So instead, I pieced my body together little by little (as you'll see later). Here's a foot shot



This next shot is the face shot I ended up using. I used different hair and cut off everything from the next down, but I find it so important to think in elements when I'm taking a shot



and here's how levitation is usually done - by propping yourself up somehow/getting someone to hold you in various positions and blending them together. unfortunately this position didn't work for this shot so it was rendered useless to me, however i am posting it regardless because i look mega strong



Finally, here are some photos I took on my iPhone while I was editing all the shots together...



as you can see, every single limb is missing to start with. That's why it's so important never to delete a single shot because you never know what you might use it for - I constructed my tummy from part of an arm I think, because I didn't take any of my tummy in that position. I took a hand from a shot where i'm randomly holding up a book, which I would never usually have used but it worked really well.

Colour wise, I first deepened the yellows and brought up the reds, adding a little bit of green curve. I then desaturated the greens overall just a tad andf fixed the book colours to make it less noticeable that there were so many Harry Potters in there!!!

Just incase that shot didn't work (as you can tell by the outtakes, I wasn't hopeful), I took another simplified one:



and did some quick headshots just for funsies because my hair was SO frizzy from the rain!!


the end!



wheee