Help with family portrait

stevetiler

stevetiler

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Steve
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Hi all,
A friend of mine has asked if I can replicate this Rolling Stones album cover with members of his family!

View attachment 39866

Any tips would be appreciated as I'm not sure where to start to be honest! I'm fairly ok with photoshop but this has got me stumped!

Cheers Steve
 
it looks like a back light of each person done separately.
then you just collage them.
 
You make it sound easy! Do I use a flash or something else?
 
Who are those guys, from the outside in - is it Mick, Bill, don't know, Charlie and Keith? I never saw that cover before.

No I wouldn't use a flash, I'd use a desklamp, note that the heads have to mask it so it just becomes a rim light. Also think about the background - what it'll be & how it's lit. It needs forethought about light levels and exposure but this can be set up before the sitters arrive. It's not sophisticated - I'd say that the lighting here is quite crude, thus not so hard to emulate ...

As above - one head at a time ...

The compositing may be harder & will depend on what apps you have ... you need something that can handle layers ...
 
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You need to light each one the only the edge of the hair is lit from behind, then in photoshop you put them together as layers. you might find it easier to shoot them with a black background and cut them out after as you have to scale them down to fit inside each other..
 
it was quite possibly done in camera at the time using multiple exposures given when it was taken.

If I was doing it now I would shoot each person individually, sit them in profile to the camera in front of a plain wall or seemless backdrop and expose to black, place a flash directly behind their head to get the silhouette outlined. For the main image I would add a second gelled light aimed at the bottom of the background to add the gradient seen at the bottom of the image. Load all images as layers in photoshop set the blend modes to lighten or screen and resize the images to line up as desired.
 
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stevetiler said:
You make it sound easy! Do I use a flash or something else?
Click to expand...


Flash in a dark room. Place the flashgun behind the person so no direct flash is entering the camera or bouncing off anything else. In fact, unless you have a large room, or a black room... you may be better off doing this outside in a large open area at night.

It is easy actually. Just work out how to trigger the flash remotely... if you have a recent camera and flashgun, the camera's internal flash can probably be used as a trigger mechanism without actually affecting the exposure. Just experiment with aperture until you the levels you need... bingo.

Your attempts aren;t bad, but too much flash and too much light wrapping around the subject. Pull the flash further back and lower it's output. Use a larger, darker space too to prevent internal reflections bouncing light back. As I said above... doing this outside at night would be perfect.
 
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Thanks for that! You are dead right about the flash bounce - that was my main problem. In fact a lot of the light "wraparound" was boosted in PS and I over cooked it ! Doing the shot outside sounds like a good idea - will try that next!
 
stevetiler said:
Thanks for that! You are dead right about the flash bounce - that was my main problem. In fact a lot of the light "wraparound" was boosted in PS and I over cooked it ! Doing the shot outside sounds like a good idea - will try that next!
Click to expand...


You genuinely won't need a lot of processing if you light it right. It's dead easy to this in camera if you can just stop the light bouncing around.
 
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