Ten Minute Portraits: Evolution of an Idea

Yesterday was an early release day from school. I’m not crazy about early release days. All or nothing, please.

Anyway, what that really means is now I have three extra hours of trying to keep my kids from hitting each other or screaming enough to alarm the neighbors. After two hours of multiple coloring pages, trashing their rooms and enforcing the clean-up, inevitably they wanted to watch TV. Phineas and Ferb, which I actually love. But, sensing an excellent bribery opportunity, I told my son I needed some pictures of him. Because when he’s thirty, and he looks back at all of the pictures of his sister, he’ll feel left out. And one day he’ll thank me for it. And I’m your mother and I said so. So in order to get access to the TV, he agreed to take a picture for me.

On Pinterest, I saw this great idea for making superhero capes from an old t-shirt. I love it, because it requires no effort from me, in contrast to the old hair tie and blanket method. Ever since I made this for him, he’s been wearing it non-stop, so since he already had it on, I decided to go for a superhero picture.

I sprayed his hair up crazy so it would look wind-blown and had him stand in front of the doors to the lanai, thinking the blown-out backlight would look cool.

It was obvious that wasn’t going to work. So next, I thought I would go in front of my go-to wall, with my 24-70 lens at 24mm and have him jump.

Nope. Not even close. So then, we went into his bedroom, and I thought I might try having him jump off the table.

It’s boring and the light is flat. So I ran and put a flash on my camera and decided to bounce it off the wall to my left while he jumped off the bed to my right. I also put it on manual focus so that I could catch him as he jumped.

I closed the door to get rid of the distraction from the frame to the right. I could sense that this was on the right track, so I had him jump over and over again.

And I’m sure you can imagine how dreadful that was for him. “You mean, you WANT me to jump off the bed? A lot of times?” “Yep!” “Okay!”

His sister was quick to get in on the action, too.

I liked what I was getting, but it still wasn’t quite right, so I laid down on the ground and shot up instead of straight forward.

And that was the shot. Still far too distracting though, with the fan and the alarm, and the things on the wall. I brought it into Photoshop and went to work with the content-aware fill and the patch too. Around the areas where the fan hits his arm, I used the clone tool before using the fill and patch tool. On the left, I stretched the canvas and got rid of everything there. Finally, I felt it was too yellow, so I used and adjustment mask to lighten and desaturate the yellows.

If you’re interested in learning more about editing, check out some of the online Photoshop and Lightroom classes I teach at I Heart Faces.

Canon 5D, 24mm, f/4.5, 1/125th, ISO 2000, Canon 580EXII on TTL at +2.

Start to finish time from hair to finished edit? Probably 25 minutes, but it’s a picture that I’ll treasure forever.

More ten minute portraits here and here.