I recently had the opportunity to teach a group of photographers, from the Florida Professional Photographers, how I create my Creative Portraits.
Teaching is always such a fun experience, especially when you have a great group of people as I did in Florida.
As part of the class, I guide photographers through the process of creating a portrait in my style of composite photography.
Using students from the class, this is the composited portrait we came up with.
As with all my Creative Family Portraits, I wanted to give my class a sense of what it’s like to create a story within a portrait like this.
And, since we’re in Florida…
Our story for the purpose of this 4-day class needed to be simple, which is why we only involved two characters, Tennessee who is grabbing for his camera as he’s falling into the pool, and Marti who’s on her scooter backing into Tennessee and knocking him into the pool.
The basis of ALL good stories is to have an antagonist (Marti) and a hero (Tennessee) that draws the viewer into the portrait.
To give you a better sense of how all this comes together, let me show you some of the behind-the-scenes photos we used to create our composite.
The first part of any composited portrait is to “set the scene”, which means we need to photograph the pool in this case.
Once we have the scene set and digital artwork complete, we photograph the characters acting out their parts of the story.
As you can imagine, this is a lot of fun and we were all laughing pretty hard as they struck their poses.
Compositing Artwork
Now that we have all the main pieces to our composited portrait puzzle, it’s time to go back into the classroom and put pen to Wacom tablet.
After days and hours of work, our portrait still needed some compositional support, so we head back out to the pool to photograph some details.
Now that we have everything we need for our crazy story, we put it all together to create one amazing composited portrait using 12 photos.
The week ends with everyone in creative and mental overload and thanks to a few of my fellow students, we went over to Daytona for some much-needed R&R.
To the Professional Photographers of Florida, thank you so much for a wonderful weekend, an amazing experience, and new friends who made it so dang fun.
