There is nothing new, under the sun
- Not sure who said this but it's radical
This is another in our series called STRANGE LABS (see the first here: a 500-exposure couples shoot). The aim of these is to explore brand new ideas in the wedding/human-editorial photography and wedding videography space, with a focus on creating new techniques or taking a different view of old ones. This section has been developed to inspire new thinking in our own genre.
There's nothing new under the sun, but occasionally you can fuse things together in a new-ish way. Like putting a few ideas into a blender, and seeing what comes out.
Today we're going to look at the Party Panorama. This photo is eleven images stitched together.
The challenge
For Sarah and Andrew, I came back with a very large haul of reception images that showed a wild level of anarchy. It seemed that in order to do it justice, there should be some sort of collage that showed "everything". Was it possible to create a collage that didn't look tacky? Who knows...
The solution
The reception was set against a dark background, and I bounced my Canon 580 speed-lite off the roof, which means all of the images, more or or less, had similar lighting. This made it ripe for cutting them out, and layering them over one another, without them appearing like they were shot in different locations.
Individual frames were selected that had "something extraordinary" going on. This criteria is kinda vague, but if you trust your gut it's pretty apparent what those images are.
From there, I sent them to my clipping-path extractor, who cut out the bits that I wanted to keep. Essentially what they were removing from each image, are non-useful background details, lights, etc.
Then, they were all layered and assemble in photoshop. To seal the illusion, some wayward beer-sprays were blended over the top of intersecting images.
Here are a couple of close ups of some segments
If you want to find out more about how this was pieced together in detail, a full video of the process is available inside the MESMERISE photo editing course. For more strange things, head to the Beautiful Strange Wedding Photography gallery.
-
MESMERISE: a photo editing course$900.00 -
100 Mixed Messages$199.00
