During the beginning of the Coronavirus quarantine, every photographer was doing virtual photoshoots through Facetime calls. Pretty quickly, everyone got bored of them. But I wasn’t ready to dismiss them until I had tried shooting one myself. I love a good challenge and I wanted to see how creative I could get with such a physical limitation. The future is here and I want to be a part of it.
I really wanted to further explore capturing images through a projector after doing a self-portrait projector shoot (shown in the previous post). I decided to use Zoom video call and cast it onto my bedroom wall. There were two challenges that I needed to overcome: poor camera quality and making the images look like I shot them in person.
I had the model place one soft box to her left side for a moody atmosphere. Then, I decided to distort and blur the images by putting a glass over the projector light. I added various textures like honey and liquid to the glass and saw what happened. It didn’t give me the refraction I was looking for but it created some beautiful blurs and melting effect.
What I saw next absolutely blew my mind. My camera was picking up LED pixels from the screen call and added these random colors into my images. I didn’t even need gels! I went along with the colors and I am blown away with the way these came out. I also placed a flower in front of my projector to create some shadow effect on the model’s body. I thought having something real on my part would help make the photo become more alive. I pushed the vibrancy and warmth in photoshop and am very happy with the results.
Discovering new techniques have inspired me greatly and I can’t wait to discover more new ideas that push the envelope.
