I am an opportunist, I saw a pool, had two willing participants, and Peter was in a good mood, so I thought I would try an underwater image.
Google “Underwater Renaissance Photography” and look at the images and you will find amazing work from not only the photographer, but also the models. It is challenging to capture graceful movement in tons of fabric, and facial expressions that look as if they live under the water. I found the easiest images to work with were the ones in which the face was obscured, its hard to hold your breath and have a pleasant expression. Peter made the capture (he can stay underwater longer than I can), and I directed (*smiles*).
The Setup and Capture
I purchased some long dresses from Goodwill. I found dresses with a lot of chiffon fabric worked best. I also gave each person a piece of loose chiffon to move around in the water. We used a point-and-shoot Canon G-15 with an underwater housing. Peter mentioned there was a shutter button lag in the underwater housing. We tried group shots, plus single shots.
For the cover image, I also created abstracts by injecting ink into water.
Post-Processing
The final images are composites. These two images involved removing distractions from the swimming pool, and selecting pieces of moving fabric from other images, positioning it, warping when necessary, and blending them in using layer masks. All of this work was done in Photoshop. In some cases, I used Hue/Saturation layers to change the colors of the fabric to create a more cohesive color palette. To finish the image, I used Alien Skin’s Exposure plug-in to pick a color treatment.
pamphotography 