Making the image: “Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much.”

A few weeks ago I woke up with an image in my head. I don't mean to sound pretentious by that but I literally did. I jotted it down on my phone so I didn't forget. Looking at the note now I can't believe it's taken 44 days to get this done!

5:24am is an ungodly hour!

The idea was a bit daft and random. I originally saw it as someone sat on a chair with a canvas crudely smashed over their head and someone else casually painting them. 

I didn't really have a good location, an art class would of been perfect, or an artists studio, but they wasn't available to me. So I had to have a re-think.

So the new plan was to have myself coming out a modern art canvas, as if I am the painting. I would be reaching out to Laura and she would have paint on her cheek where I had just touched her.

I can't paint, but fortunately neither can most modern artists. So I whipped this modern classic up in 5 minutes.

 

I was trying to convey my inner most fears in this piece... you're probably not deep enough to get it. 

 

The first element I needed to shoot was Laura in position with the canvas on the wall. I really fucked up with the composition, the canvas is almost centre and Laura is cropped off! I'll go into this more later.

I only had two flashes, both the cheap yet incredibly good and reliable Yongnuo YN460ii. 

You can see from the above image I had one in an octobox umbrella with a grid to give that nice rim light around the front edge of Lauras face.  It really helps her stand out and give definition to her. I think the final image feels almost like we are both popping out the picture, the rim light is the most important part for achieving this.

The second flash is in a beauty dish between the right of the camera and the left of Laura pointing directly at the centre of the canvas. It wasn't gridded but did have a diffuser cover on it and gives a nice gradual spot light effect on the canvas as well as lighting the left side of Laura (a reflector was used to fill this in also).

 

Once I got the shot I moved the octobox out the way and took a clean shot with no lights or people in frame. 

Now for my part! I knew the easiest way to edit this would to be to have me actually coming out the painting. I needed to recreate the lighting set up I had elsewhere and lower down. I jotted a few rough measurements down so I could match both the lighting positions and the angle the camera is to the canvas.

 

I wasn't looking forward to the painting myself part. I used face paints on my face and then the paint I used for the canvas on my arms, chest & neck. The hair I would sort in photoshop!

All I could think of was the woman who died in a James Bond film of suffocation because she was painted gold... I didn't want to die this way! lol.

So covered in paint with arse crack on show I squeezed myself through the canvas loosing my dignity in the process.

They edited together with not too much fuss. The matched light worked perfectly. I did make a bit of a stupid error in that I had the canvas at a different rotation to what it was on the wall although this didn't cause a problem.

With the image finished I wasn't happy. As I mentioned before the composition was crap! I looked back through my images and found one with Laura stood further forward so her back was in frame. I decided to try and extend the right hand side of the image so I could crop away some of the left to give a more pleasing composition using Lauras back from the out-take shot and extending the wall by simple stretching the wall from the clean shot I took using the free transform tool.

Much better! I would post the first edit but I don't actually have a copy of the file... 

Oh look! Here's a pretty gif.

A note of the title, it's got bugger all to do with the image, it's (one of the many) quotes I like from an awsome book I'm reading called 'Shantaram'. Anyone read it?