Matthew Botos

In the spirit of Halloween, I decided to have some fun with Digital Photography School’s “What’s in your bag?” Assignment this week. The idea spawned from the Ansel Adams quote,”The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.” It was a full evening’s worth of work, but a very entertaining challenge!

Of course, the real fun comes in explaining the process behind the shot. Or shots - this is actually a composite of one of the bag and one of my head. To keep it believable, I kept the same lighting in both and marked the position of the bag so everything would line up. The bag went first, since it was easier than the self-portrait!

First, I set the camera to kill the ambient light. Then I added a primary light as a gridded flash from high left of the camera, giving a nice pool of light. Adding a white foam board reflector on the right filled in that side of the bag (and later, my face).

Finally, to separate the back of the bag from the background, a second flash fired from the floor. It also flared into the lens, which was solved by goboing (blocking) it three inches off the floor with a cardstock flyer from the PhotoPlus Expo taped to a bottle of rum

The headshot kept the same primary light and reflector; I actually taped out their positions in case I bumped them. The backlight got in the way, and would’ve been blocked by the bag anyway, so I got rid of it. I donned a white t-shirt and laid on another white piece of foamboard to block out my head, and fired off a few shots with a wired remote shutter release.

My neck was angling downward, so I raised the board with a cardboard box (from Chase Jarvis’s book) to get a flat angle matching the bag flap.

Most of the post-processing work was cutting out my head and it’s shadow. The white background and shirt helped, but it didn’t completely encircle me. A few grayscale thresholds helped me get the boundaries; the rest was masked by hand. (There are some good Gimp tutorials on this, which I should’ve reviewed myself!) The shadow was masked as a separate layer, and filled with black to an opacity matching the bag’s shadow.

I thought I was all done, when I realized that since you can’t see the back of the bag, you might guess that I just stuck my neck through a hole in bottom of the bag, killing the whole headless concept. Since I still had everything setup, I decided to reshoot the bag wider. Easy enough using a zoom lens, but I wanted to stay with the sharpness of my 50mm prime. So I ran a string along the original line of sight, and backed the camera up along it to preserve the angle.

In the wider shot, the flare from the backlight really exploded, so I moved it to high back left with a snoot to light up the back and top of the bag. I figured it wouldn’t throw off the head shot too much since it wasn’t going to spread that far.

The end result worked out quite well; I think the original tight shot has lighting that’s a hair more consistent, but the wide shot really sells the concept:

View all the What’s in Your Bag photos