Create A Magical Floating Portrait

Armed with a stepladder, a tripod, a camera and a violin, Jason Parnell-Brookes shows you how to take your portraits somewhere magical

Although this shot looks rather complex, it’s actually relatively simple to piece together. A bit like a jigsaw we need to go one piece at a time and then methodically stick them together. This photograph is composed of several pictures taken in sequence. There are only really two sections to this shoot: taking a picture, and masking sections of it later on in Photoshop.

Firstly, with the Nikon on a tripod we compose our scene and dial in our settings before taking a test shot with the model standing in place. Some adjustments can then be made to the composition before starting the sequence.

With the Nikon locked in place on the tripod we must take care not to knock the camera or tripod during the process. Doing so will misalign the background with previous shots and make extra work for us when it comes to stitching them together in Photoshop later on. If the background remains in exactly the same place for each image, it’ll just be a rather simple case of masking out unwanted sections of the image.

We’ll need to take one picture of our model, for which we’ll ask her to climb on a stepladder and pose with a violin that we’ll be using as a prop. This photograph will give us the ingredients we need for editing later. After we’ve done this a few times, making sure we’ve got it how we want it, all that’s left to do is take an empty photograph.

This frame will be the backdrop where every other photo we’ve taken sits. Once we have the images that we need, we’ll load them into Photoshop and add masks to each layer, slowly revealing only parts of our model (and completely removing the not so fantastic stepladder) until we have our beautifully fantastic final product.

STEP BY STEP / Piecing together something otherworldly