Matthew Botos

For this year’s Christmas card, I wanted to do something unique and creative to exercise the photographic muscles I’ve grown this year. From a few related concepts, I settled on having Meadow playing with a Christmas ornament ball that I happen to be stuck inside.

My one thought on doing this as a pure practical shoot was to shoot my reflection in the ball. Alas, shiny objects are difficult to shoot, and spherical shiny objects are an order of magnitude harder. Fortunately, a matte-finish ball was more manageable, but meant compositing multiple shots. Drawing on past experience, I made sure to have a completely solid background and consistent lighting in two shots: one of Meadow and the ball, and one of me.

The lighting for this was actually the easiest part: an overhead flash into a silver umbrella and a second flash back lighting the white paper background. The white paper and side fill boards brought up the shadows nicely. A few photo books by Joe McNally and John Harrington did double-duty as paperweights

For my head shot, I raised everything up, and arranged three fill boards in a circle in front of me to mimic the ground reflection of the white paper in the first shot. The supports were a rich menagerie: a mop handle clamped in a bike stand for the background, a chair, and a magic arm clamped to a tripod for the fill boards.

The toughest part of the shoot was the subjects! Meadow took an interest in the setup as usual, but after an initial inspection and few food bribes, she lost interest. Perhaps it would’ve been better to shoot her pose separate from the ornament, removing one of the variables.

I’m getting better at being on the other side of the camera, but it’s tough to conjure up good emotion when you’re alone with the camera. Once I got the settings dialed in, though, I was able to focus on my “motivation” - namely how amused/shocked I would be if I were trapped in a glass ball being eyed down by a giant cat.

Onto the real magic: post-production. I loaded all 94 shots into Aperture and made my picks, along with a few color adjustments. I also cloned out the dark spot on the ornament; Aperture’s cloning tool is easier to use than the Gimp’s. In the Gimp, it was mostly a matter of masking out each layer. With a solid  background, making the mask a threshold of the greyscale was quite effective, after which I feathered out the edge halos. For myself, switching to a black shirt was a wise move, though I had to retrace the fine lines around my glasses, which began to tempt me into getting a cheap tablet.

Final assembly required moving and scaling myself into the ball at 50% opacity, just right to look like I was inside the red glass without being a ghost. Once scaled, I blacked out the rest of the mask outside the ball. With a pure white background, I made a few final mask tweaks and a final crop. It went surprisingly quickly; maybe two hours total. Saving intermediate versions also paid off as I decided to use the isolated self-portrait for some of my online profiles.

This was a really fun project and hopefully brought some smiles to everyone on my Christmas list!