I had so much fun with this image.
Becky used to play rugby for a girl's team while at school and when we asked her to model this shot for us there were no problems... except she no longer had any rugby kit to wear (apart from boots, which we never used in the final shot). This is where Heather, one of my assistants stepped in.
She has an amazing ability for source anything, costumes, props and even locations. She's a bit of a "find-it" wonder-woman! It wasn't long before she tracked down a kit and when Becky arrived at the studio, Heather even had a choice of colours !
The studio set up was fairly simple; two lights behind Becky, illuminating her left and right cheeks and a large softbox in front on her, overhead, pointing down at approx 45 degrees. I diffused the lights behind her as I didn't want the shadows to be too harsh. She stood in front of a white backdrop, but it wasn't
illuminated and in fact looks quite grey, due to the lack of light falling on it. Either way it didn't matter what the colour was, because it was going to be removed in Photoshop (above).
Becky had not done a great deal of modelling in front of a camera, but once we had the lights just as we wanted them and the atmosphere had been lightened with some humour, she soon relaxed and was just spectacular. She pulled some extraordinary faces and we were all rolling about. The images captured in that short burst were wonderful and she made the job so easy. We had the shot and were finished before we knew it.
The next step was to find a suitable background to put behind Becky's image. Once again Heather rose to the challenge and found a very co-operative ground nearby in Croydon, the Old Whitgiftians Rugby Club.
A few days later I drove up with camera, tripod and laptop, plonked myself in the middle of the pitch and was fortunate to be there just as the sun disappeared behind clouds. I took seven exposures, ranging from 3 stops over-exposed through to 3 stops under-exposed, and could see that the clouds were going to look nicely ominous the darker the images appeared.
The shot below is of the normal exposure, the two shots underneath show the extremes of the seven images, from brightest to darkest..
The last stage was to put it all together.
The merging of the background image was done using software called Photomatrix Pro. It takes multiple images and merges them in an infinite number of ways, over which you have full control. The resulting image is the one below. I tweaked it in Adobe Lightroom afterwards, to increase mid-range contrast and sharpen up, I also increased highlights and darkend some of the grass in the foreground.
Pasting Becky's studio image on top was the last phase, which was done in Photoshop. Her image also went through some additional Photoshop work before it was added.
All in all, a pleasing result. If you have any questions please post them below.
All images can be viewed larger by clicking on them
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