Every year since I started my studio I’ve been helping Sheares Hall (my Hall of Residence for 3 years back in my university days) to photograph their annual Dinner & Dance Pageant Contest photos. I do it because I don’t get much work that comes in which requires me to photograph people, even when I do, it’s usually rather boring work. So every year I volunteer to take their photos and we come up with some ideas and I put them into visuals.

It was SUPPOSED to be a “Bollywood” themed event, however the costumes they rented were Persian in nature. As such I shot them with an “Aladdin” theme instead. Hopefully they will be able to use the visuals I provide but put a “Bollywood” spin on things. So the girls were genies and the guys Aladdin with their magic carpet.

Anyway, here’s this year’s photographs.

Here’s a video showing how I edited one of the girl’s photographs. The celestial background was painted with custom brushes later to match that of the guys (less the clouds).

Here’s the video showing how I edited the guys version. I already masked out the subject prior to this video (not much to see there anyway). The star trail and background clouds were all custom brushes.

In total I 1 evening to photograph them, about 2 afternoons to mask all of them out one by one and another full day to edit everything else. Pretty quick actually, I thought I would take much longer than that.

The photoshoot itself was pretty straight forward, for the girls a single huge softbox provided the key light with another rim light from the far right. I photographed them with a moderately wide lens from the top of a ladder so as to get a slight linear perspective to make it easier for me to blend them into the “genie smoke”. I also had the girls jump for me in order to have the illusion of flight.

For the guys, another simple setup with two lights coming in from the far left and right (as if the moon was at their back). The carpet itself had objects under it as well as strings to each corner to prevent the carpet from looking too flat. For the guys I had an assistant fire a fan from a specific angle in order to catch the fabric in motion. A similar wide angle lens was used with me sitting atop a high lader in order to capture a more interesting perspective. The carpet was bought from Arab Street for $15 and has not been tested for flight yet.

Yup, that’s about it.

Ervine.

Update

I was asked if I could composite them into a two group shots, one for the girls, one for the guys. Wasn’t too pleased with the results but here it is.

Essentially I was trying to make it seem as if they appeared out from a single point, like a supernova of sorts. Oh well…