Levitating Jasmine (Patreon)

Levitation shots are one of the most fun and easiest shots to do when playing around with photography and Photoshop.

As you can see with this shot above of my friend Jasmine that we took in the Adelaide Botanical Gardens. I just tool a couple of stools along and we propped her up. To see a shot like this its all in the post, you generally want a very serein expression and i wish she wasn't look at the camera in this shot as I think eye contact breaks the illusion, but nonetheless I do love this shot. Jasmine was worried about the dress falling so low but i think the curse of the thigh and the way the material drapes really adds to the shot.

To get this shot you need a to set you camera up on a tripod, you can get away these days without one but it just makes things so much easier.

We first take a series of shots of our model in position trying various arm and leg positions as well as expressions. 

When we are done we carefully get our model to remove herself from the scene and we also carefully move both chairs, we want to leave any lights however setup exactly the same. We then take another shot that we call our background plate. This contains all the information previous hidden behind out model, and more importantly hidden behind the chairs

You will get some shift just due to working in the areas and you need as little wind as possible so the leaves stay in the same spot.

Once we have our two images we load them into Photoshop as separate layers in a single document.

We select both layers and go EDIT>AUTO-ALIGN LAYERS, leaving this on auto we hit OK and the program will look for common elements in both images and align one to the other. Then using a layer mask we paint out the chair legs revealing the background plate and hopefully matching image behind.

This wasn't meant to be a step-by-step tutorial but a conceptual look at how its done. If you would like more details ho- to's on stuff like this i'd love to know!

Another shot from the same setup.

Jasmine is an amazing painter and artist you can check out her work here: 

https://www.instagram.com/jasmine_crisp/