Post #527030 by DejaVoodoo on Thu, Apr 29, 2010 1:07 PM

Today was the day! For the photoshoot, that is. With my faux homemade tapa cloth in hand I set out for the darkness of the garage. There I assembled my cheap backdrop, thanks in no small part to Big Lots! As you'll see in the following pictures, I used my tapa cloth on the top and two faux grass table skirts on the bottom to give the backdrop some variety and interest. It was more economical for my purposes than any bamboo I could find in my area and truly suited the needs of this little project of mine perfectly. Once the backdrop was established, I began building my scene in front of it. First I positioned the large plants, then the carved tiki and dollar store torches, and finally the lighting that would make everything look like it all belonged together.

Here's the scene at its crudest. You'll see, as the pictures progress, that I added and subtracted plants as necessary, including some bright salmon colored hibiscus garland I also bought at Big Lots! It's between the tapa and grass skirting if you can't find it. The garland chair rail doesn't add much, but it does help to make the line between the two materials softer and less contrasty.

Here's another angle of the above picture. That styrofoam cooler in the foreground is my makeshift camera tripod. God bless TV snack trays. Where would we all be without them?

OK. Here's where things start to get interesting. As you can see, I've refined the arrangement of the scene and finally managed to achieve a lush jungle atmosphere. Moving on...

Lighting is EVERYTHING! The scene is still zoomed out too much at this point, and it's a tad blurry. However, of all the sots I took, this was the only one with the lighting where you could see the rough edges of the photoshoot. I continued refining my lighting and composition in take after take and ultimately arrived at...

With minimal Photoshop enhancement (you didn't think I was crazy enough to light those torches in the house, did you!?), here is the final (almost) shot. It was so cool to capture 90% of the detail and color saturation you see in the above photo live in the "studio." Doing so makes the finished product that much more real and believable.

Anyway, from this point I'm going to add some text in the top right hand corner and call it a day, although I'm sure I'll continue to tweak the small details over the next week or two. I'm quite pleased with the results so far and hope you all enjoyed seeing the process. Thanks for all the ideas and suggestions along the way!

[ Edited by: DejaVoodoo 2010-04-29 16:58 ]