HI, you’re reading this, so: welcome! I’ve written this blog post to document how I created this image, let’s say Snow-white. First and foremost I have to say: I did NOT entirely think up this concept myself, I got the idea from a guy named Robert Cornelius (I am a HUGE fan of his work), he’s done the same thing and he did it before I did (check here how he did it, included a high speed edit movie too). Why did I do it then? Well I needed a low-budget but technically advanced picture. This idea I saw was just perfect. Making it is relatively low-budget, it is indeed technically challenging. The only thing is, it ended up a little too close to the version Robert made. That can be due to the fact I’m maybe a bit too carefull when trying something new, I could have done that differently I think, but hey. Sometimes you like the result so much, the path to get there gets less important. I’m proud of this en glad I managed to do it anyway. The simple question here was: Can you do it? and the answer: YES I CAN! Let’s go through the steps.

The make-up artist (MUA) and the model at first didn’t have a good idea about what we were going to do I fear. It’s like that when shooting composite images. LOLZ, I pretended I knew exactly. First we chose make-up and hair, unfortunately it’s not really that visible in this picture but here it is;

There. Some forest colours. Goes well with dark hair 🙂 At this stage we were ready to go take the picture. We actually took a lot, because, what would the pose be of a young female walking through the forest even if she was Snow-white? I had to pick one after the shoot.

After posing and shooting the model, I had to have a lot of pictures of the flowers to construct a dress, we also had ferns to create a top. My daughter said during post-processing she liked flowers for the top as well, but by then I already had the pictures for the top so that was not an option.

As you can see (this bunch of flowers was the only one we had), if you’re doing it like this you need a big amount of pictures to construct a whole dress from. After like at least 50 shots, we needed to do the top. Someone had to keep the ferns to the models body and then we had another significant amount of pictures to take. All this time we didn’t want the model to move too much (except to hold flowers and leaves), we needed the light to be more or less constant on all pictures.

Working together as a team. Flowers, leaves, flowers, leaves.

The point in this was to prove I can actually make a dress out of nothing so I can relax if I don’t have a good idea about styling first. Or don’t have a beautifull dress at my immediate disposal. I think it went ok, I like what it became. The only thing is, it’s a lot of work, it just MAY be more efficient to just make the dress and make a picture of that instead. It wil save hours and hours of photoshop time that went into making this. But if you don’t mind Photoshopping, it might be worth it, it’s a fun way to create something completely different, to actually ‘create’ something.

Model : Sammia Shoots
Make-Up and Hair : MD Make-Up