To say we loved the show, The Queen’s Gambit would be an understatement. Now, before you start JUDGING, please know that my daughter did not watch ALL of it with me and only saw a few parts – enough to make her think Beth Harmon was the coolest, smartest chick on the planet. As soon as she watched a bit of the first episode with me, she asked me to chop all her hair off. So we did. Then, the next time she watched some with me, she asked for a Chess board, so I bought her one.
Now she is hoping to become a Chess prodigy….and the verdict is still out on that one.
Anyway, one day as we were playing chess and the light was hitting her JUST RIGHT, I came up with the idea to document her as Beth. She was totally into it.
My settings for all of these shots were f/1.4, 1/4000 and ISO 640. I was using my Canon 5D Mark iii and my Canon 35mmm 1.4L lens. I will show you a few of the images I had to put together below to create the one image where the chess pieces are falling all around her. I used Photoshop to put the images together.
Below you can see that I used a few images to create the final image where the Chess pieces were falling around her. I took one portrait image of her as my base and then added others on top to get the Chess pieces. We started by having her throw the pieces up in the air, but it was too chaotic and I couldn’t capture them all in the frame together. So then, I asked my husband to drop them over her head, gently. This seemed to work best. I also had her step out of the frame for a few and asked him to drop them but we found the ones with her present worked best when putting them all together. It allowed me to stay at the same distance as the original portrait image and get my dimensions correct.
To learn more about composites, please join me over at Unraveled Academy, where I teach!
