The Falconer and Owl Composite – Part 1

Keeping in the spirit of last Thursdays screencast about making a Channel Mask I thought I would take things up a level and give you a step by step guide to how I created the Falconer and Owl composite starting with the photography, lighting and a behind the scenes video of the shoot.

The image above was not really meant to be for a composite but never say never as I thought it would make a for a good article on how best to extract a subject from a black background when the lighting is already quite contrasty which makes for a tricky extraction. This is where we are going apply the knowledge learned in the previous screencast and flip it on its head

Photography

I photographed Jamie the Falconer and his Eagle Owl last year in front of the Turnberry Hotel & Golf resort at the bottom of the hill. Not that you would know it, so here is wider out-take shot from the assignment to let you see where we were working. Everything was shot between the lamp on the ground and the street lamp Jamie was leaning against. Mainly because auto-focus does not do so well in the dark, (Tip – Always have a torch handy for focusing) plus there was a well known background location (Hotel) that I opted to turn to black. Go figure!

This shot lets you see the a little more of the ambient that would have been there, had I included it, but that would have meant a shutter speed of 1/4 sec and lots of movement. I wanted to freeze the wings of the bird and then add movement in later on so that I could control. Therefore, you compromise freezing the action for the ambient light. “Photography is always about compromise especially off camera lighting and the next shot was no different.”I should say at this point that working up at the hotel was Plan B.

The Falconer from Stuart Little on Vimeo.

Plan A was to shoot Jamie and his birds of prey down at the famous 9th tee of Turnberry “Ailsa” golf course that goes out over the rocks along the Ayrshire coastline. But as you can see from the video and images above, there was very little ambient light left (Actually, my little Canon G9 did remarkably well managing the light) and no sunset. So back to Plan B.

There is a couple of shots that I like from the series we did with Jamie’s Eagle Owl, but this one above suited being composited better. I deliberately made the exposure 1/200th @ f8 ISO 400, so that the background went black and also, as I have mentioned already, it was so that I could capture wings without any ghosting.

I have an old SB24 backlighting Jamie and his Eagle Owl and as well as adding drama to the birds wings it also helps with the composite. “I will explain later”. The other SB28 strobe was set camera left with an 8in Honl Snoot attached to focus the light more on to Jamie, but with a little spill heading over onto the owl. Both lights were at 1/4 power and zoomed to 50mm. It was only the distance from the subject that altered the strength of the light. I also opened up the snoot a little half way through the shoot and I think at this point thats when the shot we are going to use was taken.

The SB24 was set to just above waist height 3.5ft and the SB28 was just over 6ft and angled down towards Jamie’s chest. Just a little side note… I knew I was going to not use any of the ambient, so I did not gel my flash. But had I wanted to balance both flash and ambient (Tungsten) light I would have put a full cut of CTO gel on both strobes! Remember that one…

Another point to note, is that most birds of prey really don’t mind flash going off! BUT, please, if you are going to do this kind of shoot? check with the falconer or owner of the bird before firing flash around it. Just because the 3 birds I photographed were cool as cucumbers, does not mean that all birds are…

On Thursday I will give you an in-depth guide to all the techniques I used in Adobe Photoshop CS4 to create the composite. >

Related screencasts & articles.

• The Falconer and Owl Composite - Part 2 Thu 24 Sep 2009
• 4 Photo Sequence Canvas Print Mon 14 Sep 2009
• Happy 4th Birthday, its time for a Spring Clean! Thu 08 Apr 2010

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