Continuing my collaboration with our friends kids, I asked one of them if they would wear my polka dot rain coat for a portrait. We talked about adding red polka dots to the white seamless paper backdrop, and before I knew it she had her sister’s compass and was cutting out red polka dots from construction paper I had in my office.
She found a red wig in my costume closet, and polka dot glasses in my office (I will not elaborate), and styled the entire outfit herself.
The Setup: For this set of images, I used a strobe and a large rectangular softbox positioned just slightly off to my left. I wanted the background to be white, so I tried to push as much light as I could into the scene. As you can see, I still had shadows and gradients. I addressed this in post.
The Capture: The focus of here was on playful posing and she was great to work with because she needed very little direction.
Post-processing: To eliminate the shadows and gradient, I extracted her and the dots from the background and placed them on a transparent background. I then slipped in a white solid fill layer underneath. I used a preset in On1 to create a rich contrasty look. I think accentuated the color of her eyes with a Hue/Saturation layer.
pamphotography 