Boxing anyone?

We’ve got a new photo to share and thought we’d go even more in-depth into the making of it with an explanation straight from Bill. But first, have a view at the setup and transition of the photo, “The Boxer”:

SETUP 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7

POST WORK 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 -

And, an explanation straight from Bill:

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The Boxer

Shana and I thought her readers might enjoy a detailed description on the making of this photograph.

My first step is always a solid visualization of the photograph, complete with rudimentary sketches which are so bad I won’t even bother to show them. But I believe this is such an important skill to develop. If you can visualize the finished photograph, and progress to visualizing the set, and subsequent steps, you are then able to solve many of the problems of the shoot before they occur. This always contributes to smooth shoots.

So I wanted a model that looked “tough” enough to be a boxer yet had a note of sex appeal about her. Athletic and pretty. Longer hair that could be pony tailed with random strands and frizz escaping to contribute to the working out look. Hands taped in boxing fashion, drenched in sweat.

The model would be positioned leaning over the top rope looking directly to the camera. I planned to shoot her in the studio so as to control a number of factors.

While I could have sought a boxing gym itself, I planned to composite her over a separately shot background as my visualization for the background was overly rough and worn. That thought was inspired by an old third floor I had the opportunity to see about three years ago which once housed a boxing ring. It was ravaged by 40 years of decay and had quite alot of character.

My producer researched and contacted the owners of an old industrial building that was soon to be renovated. He secured permission for me to make photographs of the interior spaces. I spent several hours making available light photographs using a Canon MKII and bracketing
as many as 15-20 exposures of each view as I planned to do an HDR of the background image. The views were carefully focused and then autofocus was turned off and bracketing was done using the shutter speed only with the lens set to approx the mid range of the fstop scale. The shutter was
released using an electronic remote release so as to minimize camera shake. The exposure times range from 30 sec to 1/30 sec.

Back in the studio I began planning for the photograph of the model.

I researched boxing ring rope and construction and hand taping, both on the internet and also spoke to several friends who were involved in the sport.

While competition rings’ ropes generally are covered with a leather sleeve, practice rings vary greatly, often being whatever the gym owner can muster. I selected a rope that fit my romantic visualization. I also got a quick lesson in hand taping for workouts.

The first problem was stretching the rope taught enough that the model could lean on it and it would have the proper amount of “give”. I did not want her to have to fake her lean so it had to support her and give a little.

I discussed this with my staff and most importantly the guy who generally handles my set construction. He fabricated an approx 6′x6′ square of 4×4 lumber with an ingenious little method of tensioning the rope. We knew it would need mechanical force. The second rope down could be simply tied in place as it required no tension. (see photos of the set)

Knowing I was going to be compositing her over a dark background we hung a large black background in the studio. A bit of further discussion is warranted here:

I have been compositing in Photoshop for many years. The two most difficult things in compositing people are hair and where the feet hit the floor/surface.
The remainder of the body is generally simple, and can be extracted using a variety of methods.

My experience has taught me to make sure the hair is shot on something close to the color/value of the intended background, and to have any full length shots arranged on a surface that is as close as possible to the intended background. This will often enable you to use all or a portion of the natural shadows from the feet.

I knew that all of my background options from the old industrial plant had plenty of light and light sources present in the photographs. This dictated using strong rim/backlight.

My model had a somewhat long thin face. I knew for that reason I wanted any 3/4 view of her face to be broad lit. (if you do not understand broad/short light, drop us a comment and I will write more about that subject).

I also wanted the main direction to be slightly overhead to enhance the gym feeling, but still light her nicely.

I selected a 34″ Mola reflector mounted on a boom. It was equipped with a 1200ws comet flash head. It has the internal diffusion disc as well as the diffusion sock. It is a nice face light as it produces a sort of “cone” of light that falls off rapidly to the edges. That center opal glass internal diffuser makes the center hotter than the edges. The fact that it would drop off rapidly at the edge of the face and especially down the torso I knew would work well with the hard rim light.

I knew I would be adding considerable contrast in post, so I wanted to provide enough fill to have workable values in the shadow areas.

(This is a fundamental premise of digital sensors. They don’t reproduce well in the bottom end as there just aren’t as many pixels there. So if I know I am planning extreme contrast/post work, I tend to light a little more open than say a photograph that will only undergo simple adjustment. It is way better to “push” something darker in post than to try to pull up detail from an area that is too dark.)

Fill was provided by a Bowens Ringlight at about half the power of the main source (the Mola). (http://www.bowens.co.uk/ http://www.mola-light.com/)

Two flash heads in 7″ reflectors were arranged slightly to the rear and left and right of the model. They were gelled warm amber to complement the warm sources in the background I had selected. A third was positioned high and directly behind her head. It was not gelled so as to simply appear as if coming from another source.

They were all carefully flagged from flaring the lens.

I was especially careful to make sure I had black behind her backlit hair.

These heads were all roughly the same exposure as the main source, although during a shoot I will sometimes deviate from that on the fly.

We selected her garments and I taped her hands.

We did not use any makeup by intention.

We had the model ride a stationary bike and do random exercises for about half an hour to warm up. (a person just looks different when they are warmed up). In addition we added to her sweat with a spray bottle of water.

She was photographed with a Hasselblad H2 equipped with a Phase One P45 back tethered to a Mac G5 workstation running Capture One Pro, 50-110 mm Hasselblad Lens at approx. 60mm F11.5 (http://www.hasselbladusa.com/ http://www.phaseone.com/)

We went through multiple rounds of exercise/spraying/photographing capturing about 188 frames.

I rough edited my captures down to about 10 or so, then ultimately two that were processed out of Capture One as 16 bit Adobe Photoshop Tiff Files. This produces a 225 Mb file.

My photoshop workstation is a G5 Quad processor w/8Gb Ram. I currently use CS2.

I had already completed the HDR of the background image using CS2’s merge to HDR function with about 8-10 exposures, and Photomatix’ tonemapping plug in. (http://www.hdrsoft.com)

After those steps I continued the finalization of the background with mixture of Hue/Sat softlight/hardlight layers, sharpening, mid tone sharpening for contrast and dodge and burn techniques.

These are all well covered in detail in various internet tutorials.

The model underwent preliminary retouching, then similar treatments as stated above until her look was roughly in place.

I like Fluid Mask (http://www.vertustech.com/) for lots of my masking needs especially hair. She was separated from the studio background using this plug-in and the pen tool in PS.

The background file is actually somewhat smaller and differently proportioned to the model file. I think it contributes to the “grittiness” to enlarge this file. It was scaled up to fit the model using the Transform tool.

A layer mask was added to the model layer and lots of careful detail work was executed to make sure her edges and hair were well blended.

The edges of the background were darkened by making a dupe layer of the background, desaturating it to B&W, and adding a layer mask to reveal the center with a large soft-edged brush, with the layer then set to multiply and the opacity adjusted to taste.

At this point it becomes simply working locally and globally using adjustment layers and masking to bring the overall look to where I want it.

I like to use luminosity masks to isolate and work specific tonal regions of the photograph. A very nice set of masks actions can be downloaded at http://www.atncentral.com they are call TK luminosity masks.

I removed the ringlight reflections from her eyes (in some cases we may want to keep these for effect but I felt it was not suited to this image) and enhanced the catchlights created by the Mola.

I also added the beam of light coming from the left by drawing a path to define the desired shape, making it a selection feathered by about 15 pixels and using a curves adjustment layer. I then masked away it’s effect from areas I did not want it.

I used a layer set to “color” to paint the warm yellow into the windows on the right and the wall on the left.

All work was performed as 16 bit RGB Tiff file in the Adobe 1998 color space.

Questions are welcomed.

Thanks for visiting us!

Bill

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By the way, I had hoped to get video of this shoot but unfortunately was unable to. However, thanks to Bill’s detailed description I think that works better than any video could have :)…it’s so hard to grasp what goes on in them sometimes.