Friday, January 29, 2021

Photography Scavenger Hunt Round 30: Hope

This is a behind the scenes of my "hope" shot for the 30th round of the Photography Scavenger Hunt

Confession time: I actually forgot about this word.  My style when doing hunts is to write down all of the words (typically 10) into a notebook that I carry with me to capture ideas during the ideation stages of each shot.  When I wrote down this list I somehow skipped over hope (insert metaphor for 2020).  However a week into the hunt someone commented in the community about this word. I realized I forgot it, and wrote it down in my book.

2 hours later I had my shot.

I immediately thought of the Barack Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign poster.  You know the one.

However I didn't wanna use myself, so I went with my ol' standby model:  Mr. Pool.

Before I got too deep in the Photoshopping for this image I looked up a tutorial online on how to accomplish this technique (there are a lot of em), and used an image of Deadpool I downloaded from the internet.  I was worried his being most red would cause issues.  Turns out it worked just fine.

Proof of concept proven, I moved on to creating my own image.  I started by putting my Deadpool action figure in my light box, put him in a "looking towards the future" pose, and lit him strongly from one side.  The SOOC looks like this:

Then I tossed it into Photoshop, removed the background, and applied the filters to make the Hope poster look, and I had the basic shot done.   I spent some time doing tonal adjustments to get the right amount of detail from his uniform.

The hardest part was coming up with the word to use at the bottom.  I didn't want to use Hope cause it didn't fit Deadpool.  I tossed around some ideas, but eventually went with the standard Pool.

This is the final result: