I have had enough photographers ask me about this I decided to do a blog post about it.

First. Why bother doing this? I am pretty new to the area and I wanted to create a buzz about my High School Senior photo business. www.arlundseniors.com if you would like to visit.

I have a friend that is the drama teacher at a local High School and I asker her if she would let me photograph some posters and then get some free advertising plus the buzz I’ll create if I do a good job.

I have done 3 posters now and they have done exactly what I had hoped.

Here are the 1st two that I shot.

So on to Alice in Wonderland & Back Again…

The first thing I do is go out to the web and look at some of the imagery that has been created. I found a few images that seemed pretty cool but one stood out to me.
It was a promo for the TV movie back in 1985:

This gave me the idea to have Alice going around a big mushroom. This past summer I had photographed a “set” consisting of plants I bought at Home Depot and a lot of dirt. It is for an photographic series that I am currently working on based on what is below us. To read more about that take a look at my other site. I Wanna Photograph You. Here is the blog post containing one of those images. http://iwannaphotographyou.com/blog/2012/11/2/creativity

I had a little success with that shoot and though I could do something like that again.

What I needed:

1. Home Depot – for strange plants. What I bought here.

2. Michaels – Moss and a fake tree and green styrofoam.

3. Whole Foods – Exotic mushrooms. Yummy

That’s about it.

The first thing I did was schedule some time to photograph the actors at the high school. My wife and I met up with the students right after school. My wife does the makeup for me. (I’m lucky)

I had a sketch drawn out already so I knew what I was going to do. Preplanning or storyboarding is essential to make things go fast. I am able to shoot quickly. Here is the sketch I used. (such the artist. lol)

Lets take a look at the actual shots.  The first was of the Mad Hatter. We just went outside with a couple of other students and I had him lean up against a brick wall of the high school.

Here is a screenshot from Lightroom of the raw file.

For the next shot of Alice I had a student hold a trash can to act as the mushroom stalk that she would be running around. I wanted her running because the wig she was wearing was very plain and I thought some movement would spice up the image.

The final shot was of the Queen of Hearts. This was basically a beauty shot since the image would feature mostly her face in the clouds. Again I just ran outside and found an empty part of sky and shot into it. I switched lenses from the 50mm to a 70-200. We added a beauty dish as the main light and a silver reflector underneath her to even out shadows.

Next up was to get the set built and hope that the actors would be easy to cut out. I went ahead and cut out Alice and the Mad Hatter and positioned them with some screen shots from the web. I went out and found a mushroom and a playing card. (I ended up using the playing card because it was so cool looking. I printed it out and made a card out of it.) The background is a photo of some trees I shot a long time ago.

I was pretty happy with the way they cut out and I was excited to put the set together.

I just set up in front of an open front door and I put my 580 flash outside to act as the backlight. To light the main area I got a AB800 and just put a 20 degree grid on the reflector and pointed down at the set.

Unfortunately I do not own a macro lens and I think that would have come in handy. I tried shooting with a 50mm a 70-200 and ultimatly went with the 17-40 so I could “get into” the set.

 

I’ll talk about how I put it all together in the next post. Let mw know your thoughts on this and these kind of posts.