Parenting 101 Photo Composite

Happy New Year!!! Also Merry Christmas, Happy Thanksgiving, & Happy Halloween. Its been a little while since I wrote a blog entry. It has been a busy couple months the last few months and I havn't had much of a chance to write post let along take photos to write about. My wife and I moved to a new house in mid October which kept me pretty busy with projects until the beginning of December. Then we were preparing for Christmas and our 2nd bundle of joy whom is due this month.

But at last I had a few weeks off for Christmas to finish up some projects and to dust off the camera and take a few shots of my son and my second annual Chirstmas Eve Christmas Tree photo.

Anyways this shot(s) I took the other day.

It was a semi random idea I wanted to try out. It is actually a composite of 5 different images. It actually pretty simple to do with a little photoshop magic.

I stacked the 5 photos as layers in photoshop and started out with this photo as a base layer.

Then each of the following photos I created a mask that just revealed my son. I added a little feather to the edges of the mask to reduce a little of the cut and paste look to the photo.

After masking each layer I would turn on and off each layer to see if there was any imperfections that may have changed or moved (ie toys, carpet shading) between shots. I would "massage" the mask to make it blend properly.

After getting the composite together in photoshop I brought it into Lightroom to adjust the basic exposure settings to get a cartoonish look to the photo.

The set up for the taking each of these indiviual shots was my Canon 7D MK II on a tripod with a 11-15mm Tokina f2.8 lens to get me a wide shot of the room. On each side of the camera was a flash shooting through a white umbrella to light up the room. (This particular room does not have any lights in it) I shot at ISO 500 F5 at 13 mm and 1/50 second shutter speed.

One flash was 2 stops brighter than the other. You can tell if you look at 2 shadows cast on the wall in the individual shots.

So that was pretty much how I experimented with that. Its nice to get a chance to shoot a couple photos. I am hoping to get a chance to shoot a little more and at least get a quick post here and there more often now that we have settled down after our move.