Thursday 23 September 2010

Family Portrait Session with Nathan & Chloe!

Today I shot portraits of Nathan and Chloe, two fantastic kids from Dove Holes. Mum Melissa told me she "didn't wan't anything normal" and that she really wanted big, natural smiles from the kids.

Today's soundtrack...



Big, natural smiles (especially the big part) happen to be my specialty! The great thing about shooting kids in their homes is that they feel at ease. Instead of shooting at a new, unfamiliar studio building, they're somewhere they love and relate to, and have LOADS of toys!

I shot 90% of these shots with my 50mm 1.4 - my cheapest lens, funnily enough!

First off, here's a before/after of the shot I posted to my flickr - Down to Earth.

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

As you can see the way I achieved his position was pretty simple - with a really strong Mum! The harder parts were editing away her hands and body, and also her feet around his face. I did this simply by taking sections of grass/wellies/trousers and reconstructing the areas that had Mel's hands etc on them.

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Of course, a shoot isn't a shoot without a few tears :) Chloe took a battle-wound (from Nathan! :P) but was back smiling within seconds. Brave gal :D

More to come!

I'll also be covering this technique on some of my tutorial videos I'm making soon. If anyone has any other requests, let me know :D

13 comments:

  1. Shots are fantastic and so is the editing.

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  2. Your whole blog is so happy Rosie, full of joy and wonderful photos! :)

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  3. Lovely! So interesting to see before and afters - so inspiring!

    I noticed a little something you might want to fix - on Nathan's left cuff in the piledriver photo there's a blob of green. Perhaps an accidental cloning of grass?

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  4. yea, i can't see the images too :'(

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  5. I am Tony from Malaysia. What I wanna say is u've did a great job! Good pics and I love the natural colors!

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  6. Good job! Always a pleasure to stop by your blog.
    C

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  7. ah, I love your work, so much inspiration to do new and exciting stuff :^) I did want to do a quick suggestion if you hadn't thought about it. I shoot images somewhat like your "down to earth" and what I used to do to make my erasing of elements easier was to shoot with tripod and take an image of the blank background before my models stepped in. Then so long as I used the same settings and didn't disturb the background too much, I could just throw both of those images as layers in photoshop and mask out what I didn't want to get to the background behind. Just an observation if you hadn't thought of it :^)

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  8. Rosie! I'm so glad I found your blog :) I just finished my website and in my "About Me" was listing artists that inspire me. I was trying to remember one of the artists you had mentioned and then realized... "Ok, ROSIE is inspiring!" I love how you take a shoot to another level without taking away the genuine emotion of the moment :)

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  9. Thanks for posting the before and after. I do photomanipulations quite often, so I'm always curious to know how other artists manipulate their photos :D

    All the other photos are wonderful too. They're dinamic, fun, real :)

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  10. Hey rosie i would like it when you make gimp tutorials ! i really haven't figured gimp out yet... please tell everyone in a gimp tutorial how to remove people in a picture ( just like you did with nathan and he's mum, so he was standing on he's head ) and please tell me how to likew hen you put a texture on a picture, how to make the overlayed picture on he's real size. everytime i try that with a picture of a whole face it zoomes in on only the eye and i don't know how to get it to the whole face..

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  11. It's a great photo session .
    love this session .
    Thanks for sharing .

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