Zosia rarely slips up during performances, but backstage is another matter…

One of my favorite portraits of 2019, this was part of a series I did for violinist Zosia and her brother Damon, who’s another formidable talent (concert cellist).

The techniques used to create this are rather simple, but take a bit of practice to get right. They’re usually used to make someone appear to be levitating, but I decided that falling had a more humorous aspect to it and went with that.

The idea is to take a bunch of different photos to capture different aspects of the final image: The hands, the hair, the dress and the instrument. You then combine them with a blank photo of the background to erase any extra stuff in the photo, such as people, chairs, lights, cables etc.

There are just a couple of important things to keep in mind:

Keep your lighting the same. Once the lights are setup, don’t move them
Keep your camera on a tripod and be careful not to shift your focus
Try to make sure that the shadows of your extra gear don’t interfere with the shadows that the main elements create - this will break the reality of the scene quickly
Keep your assistants away from complex parts of the image like hair or busy parts of the instruments, as that will make masking them out rather difficult
Keep in mind that your subjects will soak up a fair bit of light, so your background will likely be a stop lighter when they’re out of the photo. You’ll need to compensate for this is photoshop.
Beware of reflective floors. That will make your job much more difficult
Make sure your model has good core strength! They’re essentially ‘planking’ for half an hour…

You can see the composite images that made this photo here. Helping out are her brother Damon and my fiancee Yasna (who is in almost every shot I create, yet is always edited out!).

Here are a few more shots of this dynamic duo. They’re some of the most exciting musicians in the country and I’m really looking forward to watching their careers develop:

These were shot all shot on a Lumix S1R with special thanks to Lumix New Zealand.
I used the kit 24-105 f/4 which is an outstanding lens.

Lighting is done with a combination of Godox AD600 and AD200 strobes. They’re the perfect balance of power and affordability for my needs.

I’ve played with levitation photos for years now. Here’s a selection of other shots I took with a similar theme: