Photography and portraits

[Sir Edward]

This is somewhat related to the contest thread, but I thought we could start talking about some ideas for some good portrait shots we can get in our kits. I've been able to photoshop up a few pictures, but that's completely limited by what source photos we already have.

So I thought we could come up with some ideas for poses, locations, and overall scenes we could work on. As a very simple example, here's a photo from the Arn movie. He's just praying with his sword. For a simple shot, it's effective. Notice how they carefully framed it so that your eyes are drawn to his, through the crossguard. Nicely done.

[Thorsteinn]

Something like this?

[Sir Edward]

Yep, very cool! 

I'm always envious when people have some great photos. I'm notorious for only getting renfaire shots, so they're all straight-on, and usually with lots of people in the background. Nice clean scenery and well framed shots are always great to see.

[Thorsteinn]

That was for a school project a friend of mine was doing earlier this year.

At a Boyscout Demo



Repenting for opening my mouth in front of the Princess of The Mists at the wrong time.


Taken just after shooting the video for world wide learn. I figure a big fighting tunic, a camail on the helm, with hidden arms and legs and this would really work.

[Sir Ulrich]

This one good? It aint straight on or just a ren faire shot.

[Sir Edward]

I think you guys are starting to get away from what I was trying to discuss in this thread. I'm talking about crafting a photo in terms of the pose and location.

[Sir Edward]

Here we go, in another thread a while back we shared a bunch of these. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about:

[Sir Patrick]

Any idea how he does those colors?  I love that ethereal look.

[Sir Edward]

It depends on the picture. Which one in particular? The ones I don't know how to do are the ones that almost look like paintings.

Adding glowy stuff, color shifts, etc, aren't that hard. There's a variety of tricks out there. It can be as simple as adding a layer with "screen" blend mode and black fill color, drawing an ellipse in it, and then blurring the heck out of that layer with Gaussian blur, then adjust the opacity.

The image below is probably a good example. I'm not sure what they did to make it look like a painting or ink drawing, but the glow on the right could be a simple overlay like that (and possible just a gradient in that layer rather than a blurred shape):



And in this one, I think it's actual lens flare from a window:

[Sir Patrick]

The ones that look like paintings. I've seen that sort of thing around the net and have always thought it was cool.

[Sir James A]

There's a watercolors conversion that I used a tried a while back on some car pictures here: http://10steps.sg/photoshop/transform-photo-into-watercolor-painting/

Seems like a lot of my favorites aren't centered around the person / people in them, but around the entire atmosphere. One of my favorites:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/338860_211487495572731_111994695522012_549131_7574859_o.jpg

The photoshopped blade reflection is fantastic. In contrast to most other ones, I like how the background is blurred and subdued.

I also really like this one for the not-the-usual perspective:

http://s156.photobucket.com/albums/t8/jba3/medieval/from-myarmoury/original09.jpg

[Sir Edward]

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/338860_211487495572731_111994695522012_549131_7574859_o.jpg

The photoshopped blade reflection is fantastic. In contrast to most other ones, I like how the background is blurred and subdued.

Yeah, I really like what they did with the reflection on the blade in that one. It's a really nice idea, and dresses up the photo quite a lot.

[SirNathanQ]

Here's my attempts at being phototgenic. 

[SirNathanQ]

Some more. Basically I'm hoping they're good enough to photoshop into something nice by someone who knows how to photoshop    *Hint Hint* 

[SirNathanQ]

And the last bunch. I promise.