Name: Georgia
Message: Hi--love your site and your tie dye is beautiful. My question, however, has to do with your great "unlikely photos"--how did you do it. My daughters and I especially love the picture of your son riding the cat. We'd love to "copy" you and do something similar. We have a digital camera and photoshop--can we do something similar. If youdon't care to respond, thanks for providing such a great site anyway. Thanks.

For that picture, I used an old program, Adobe Photodeluxe, which came with my camera, I think. Now I recommend Photoshop Elements, but of course the full-size Photoshop program can do this, too.

Obviously, the first thing to do is cut out the figure, in this example the one of my son, and place it on a layer in front of the other picture, in this case the picture of the cat. This means you need a program that allows you to somehow remove the background around a figure, and that allows you to make a collage of two or more pictures on different layers, which end up as one image.

You can't combine just any two photographs, though. The boy riding the cat had to be riding something else in the original life picture. In this case, I took him to a playground and had him pose on various pieces of equipment. The picture I used with the cat was originally one of him sitting on a sort of dolphin mounted on large springs. The picture that ended up showing my boy lying on and peering over the edge of a mushroom started out with him lying on top of a large turtle-like playground animal.

It is difficult to take a photo that is the side view of a cat! As soon as the cat sees you, it has to come and say hello. This picture is particularly amusing because the siamese cat in the picture is a very small cat, in reality.

For the picture of my son riding a bird, I copied the picture of the bird and trimmed off everything but the wing in front from the front copy, then placed the copy with the entire bird positioned behind the picture of my son. In that case, I also had to cut out all of the background behind the bird, and replace it with a simpler and more suitable sky background.

In addition, even if the figures are posed in the same relative position, they still will not look right unless the light is coming from the same angle in both pictures. You may have to take a lot of pictures to get two that are sufficiently identical in lighting to put together. For the picture of my younger son in an eggshell, first I took a picture of him posing in an immense flowerpot at the local garden supplier. Then I printed out the picture, large and at a fairly poor quality, and took it outside with a freshly-cracked eggshell. I moved the eggshell around until the angle was exactly right to match the picture of the boy, then snapped the picture and took it inside to edit.

To add shadows, sometimes the automatic drop-shadow feature that many photo editing programs have will work, but often the result looks totally unreal. To fill in with appropriate shadows, add a new layer that is between the background and the foreground figure, and use a soft brush to color in a partially opaque grey of the right shape. It is important to do this as a separate layer so you can easily delete it and start over, without messing up the background so that you have to go back to a previously saved backup version. A little bit of dark shadow directly under a figure goes a long way towards making the entire picture more convincing.

I'd love to see the pictures that you end up making!


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