It’s a beautiful Sunday out there! Just a perfect day to work on the garden and the yard, so I won’t be too long on the blog today. There are flowers and critters all over the yard, so I’ll just head out there to make some practice photos. Hope you are enjoying your day off too! This coming week in the blog, I hope to finish the article on the Great Gatsby poster, and put up a post on shooting some interior rooms. Lots of new techniques for doing this that I am trying. Without as much help from the sun and clouds, and window light bouncing around the room, there is a lot of experimenting that is needed to get nice photos inside. In the meantime, here are some photos from outside!
Luckily we have these flowers in the backyard that attract the monarch butterflies. To be sure patience is needed as they do not follow directions very well – lol! While I was out there, I was as quiet as possible hoping that my calm will wash over them and I could snag some photos of them.
This project came out of an event happening at our dance studio this October. An upcoming theme night in October would be dedicated to the novel and movie, “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. With such an over-the-top production as Baz Luhrmann is stylistically known to produce, the poster likewise had to reflect the movie. We looked over all the posters from the recently released movie and found several types for different settings. All the photography was amazing, as well as the graphic design for the setting of the portraits. This particular version I thought would work well:
The poster would have to have 7 portraits of the staff of the dance studio, so this would be perfect. Initially I cut faces out from photos I already have from the dance events, but my limited Photoshop skills did not make it work. So, I asked the studio if I could make 3/4 portraits of the staff to use for the poster. They were all excited about the idea, and we knocked out the shoot in 2 hours!
Afterwards, I thought that maybe I could just swap portraits in for the ones already in the poster. That did not work as it would be too difficult to take out the people underneath cleanly before putting in the new portrait. By now, I realize that I really underestimated what it would take to make this poster happen. So I went back to the original poster, and looked into creating the Great Gatsby poster from scratch.
Poster Design
There are repeating background for each of the portraits, and the text and borders were metallic to resemble gates surrounding a large estate. Illustrator would be used to make the backgrounds designs. I started drawing straight up and down lines and diagonal lines exactly 45 degrees from the original lines. When the space was filled, I copied the design, and flipped it horizonally to make a mirror images on the other half of the drawing to make the top of the image.
I then took these top two mirrored images, copied them together, and flipped it vertically to get the bottom half of the background. It actually turned out well! Here is how one of the portraits turned out. I’ll show you how I finished off the poster in a future post after the portraits and background were completed. From left to right are the starting portrait, the graphics made for the background, and both put together to be put into the poster.
Firstly, the Spring Freestyles expiring at the proofing site! Also, the River City Ballroom Dance Comp photos around the same time will too. Thanks again to everyone that has visited the website to view the photos from these two popular events. We appreciate the support of our photography, and we hope you enjoy the images. Thank you!
It was a great weekend for getting photos! The weather was so nice for being outside in late July. On this occasion, I made lots of personal photos, and some that I will post soon. We took some time to take a drive to a local spot for some different photos. I did have to work on lots of orders from these expiring ballroom dance events, so these may be on the backburner for a bit. While working on the photos I attempt to put them together in different ways. As can be seen, collages can work well for dance photos:
When working on this project, I start with a basic collection of 3 portrait – orientation photos. Luckily, it is easy to find these from Arthur Murray events. Adding the logo finishes the poster to give them a saleable look!
