Posts tagged Sweden

Photoshoot : The Ocean’s Awaiting

I worked with the model Denise Karlsson for this shoot. She’s naturally beautiful, photogenic and exceptionally dedicated, so I warmly recommend her. The idea behind this shoot was a kind of ghostlike fairytale full of innocence and evil all rolled into one persona and Denise was perfect for the part.
We found some rocks in Tullinge, Sweden, which set the scene for the photoshoot. There are many cliffs and large rock formations in the Stockholm landscape, and I’ve always wanted to include some in a shoot, so this was a perfect opportunity. Unlike most of them, however, these rocks were not sealed off, so it was possible to get very close to them and to climb on top where there’s a flat area covered with lots of small stones – a quite interesting, deserted landscape. We walked around exploring some days before the shoot and I took some test shots of the model, which can be seen above.

The day of the shoot was in November. It was cold and windy and the area was full of sharp rocks, but Denise was a badass and didn’t complain once. We fashioned an improvised summer dress for her out of some fabric and cloth pins I’d bought, did some minimal makeup and curled her hair before heading out to the location. Our awesome assistant, Andreas Lenner, helped make sure that Denise didn’t turn blue by having her coat ready whenever I stopped clicking on the camera.
I recently finished editing the photos, which you can see here.

Some of them I decided to manipulate in PhotoShop to get multiple Denise’s – you can see the before and after versions above. This was done by carefully masking out the model in different photos and then layering them in a composition. It’s important to mask out the layers using brushes that are appropriate for the level of detail in the photo, if you want it to look realistic.
Another good tip for something like this is to remember to blur the different layers according to the background. In this case, further away meant more blurry than closer to the camera.
Finally, once you have achieved a good composition, adjusting the colors, levels and curves helps to make things look more consistent.