POTW 565: 13/3/21 - 19/3/21

Thanks for the likes guys ... Bit of info on the shot ... In a continuing effort to make me feel old, my daughter insisted on turning into a teenager this year. I saw a version of this online and liked the concept. Although I have a ton of shots of her I struggled getting a full length shot for each year. Some were candid shots, some shot in studio set ups at various points. When I had it finished, Mum and her had various criticisms ... "I don't like that shot, put in the cat, I prefer x, y and z" ... so various modifications were made until they were happy.

Main work in this composite is in making good selections for the cutouts, particularly around hair. Black and white ruled out having to match colours, matching relative brightness wasn't much trouble. Had to find shots where light was generally coming from the same angle so I could 'sell the fake'. Making decent contact shadows on the ground was important and creating the main shadows correctly was important too. Overall, happy with the result and it came out well printed and framed.

The shadows are created in Photoshop ... there are many ways to do that but here I simply copied each figure layer, filled with black, entered free transform, chose 'distort' and pulled it down into position, warped to fit, blurred and changed opacity to taste (that sounds more complicated than it is).