Behind the Belly Shot

I've gotten a few complements on my belly shots, so I thought I would give you a little behind the scenes look at how I create them. As many of you know by now, I am a designer. So, I guess I'm taking this project a little bit seriously. I promised myself that I would do weekly shots that I can hopefully put in a book with my weekly letters to Luigi. I didn't want to take them in a mirror. I wanted them to be consistent, and somewhat artistic. And I definitely didn't want any of the mess of my house to appear in the background.

To take some of the pressure off, I don't necessarily take the photos on the same day each week. My weeks start on Sunday. I was finding that I was never getting fully dressed on a Sunday, and wasn't happy with my face or what I was wearing. (I have mentioned I'm vain, right? And I didn't feel like putting make-up on just to take a belly shot). So, I've found that either taking the shots in the morning or evening of a work day works best. I usually try to get them done by Wednesday at the latest before I cross the half week mark. 

The first chore in composing my shots was to choose background. I thought about using Luigi's room, but knew it would be chaos in there, and would not be consistent from week to week. I settled on the white closet doors in the office. This is what they often look like when I get ready for the shot. I have to close the doors, and move a bunch of junk quickly out of the way. 

The next task was to find a place to prop the camera. I always set the camera in the same place, and use the timer setting without a flash. I'd rather fuss with the levels in photoshop later than have the tell tale shadow of a flash behind me on the wall. My camera is a canon point and shoot, which has the ability to take up to 10 shots with timer setting. Typically, I set the camera on the filing cabinet which is behind the cardboard crib box in this photo (aaah! we have a crib!) On this particular day, I had to improvise a bit, and managed to yank the ironing board out from behind the box, add a small box on top of the board, with a comb wedged under one side to make it level. Next week will be much easier now that we've assembled the crib and the box is gone!

Then I need to make sure none of the junk on the couch is going to be caught in the corner of the photo. Remember, no mess of my house will be in these shots!

I quickly pull one corner cushion off the couch and stash it somewhere else, and stack all the laundry baskets filled with clothes wrinkling away while they wait for me to fold them, on top of each other. I'm almost ready. Except, this is what I look like:

I quickly loose the glasses (which I don't wear every day, but with pregnancy, my contacts are not getting me through an entire day at the computer right now) and run a brush through my hair (which is almost never down except in my belly shots). And finally, I am ready. I position the camera, and then race across the room to stand in front of the closet. After the 10 shots, I take a quick peek at the camera to make sure I think I have at least one decent shot. This day, I didn't. They were all very crooked, so I did a second round with the comb under the box on the ironing board. 

When I finally get around to it, unfortunately, not quickly enough these days, I sort through the 10 photos I took in iPhoto and choose my favorite one. I've been deleting the extras because I certainly don't need 400 pictures of myself. I export the unedited version out so I can open it in photoshop and get down to the real work. 

I usually have to rotate the image slightly to square it up. I'm talking like .25 - .75 degrees. I do this by drawing a reference line along the bottom closet doors and seeing how off it it. Then, I crop the image from left to right, just inside the door pulls, and from top to bottom, just under the door frame, and a bit below my feet. I use the cloning tool to get rid of the shadow at the top of the right hand door, and to remove the seam between the doors so it look like one solid background. My legs usually end up hiding the seam below my head. I'll usually adjust the levels and curves a little bit to lighten things up a bit as well. Now, my shot looks a little something like this:

But, it's lacking some pop, and that nice crisp white background. So next, I run a photoshop action, Perfect Portrait from the Coffee Shop Blog, which is a bunch or preset steps, including one that lets you pick a point on the background that should be the whitest white. This is how I get the great background. When the actions are done, there are bunch of adjustment layers you can use to soften features, whiten teeth, brighten eyes, etc. I haven't been spending a ton of time with these, but usually just do a quick once over. Lastly, I open up last week's shot, drag over the two text layers and update the number. I use the eye dropped to grab a color from what I'm wearing to use the the number, and then a slightly lighter version for the weeks, and there you have it!

Now, can you see why I'm not able to actually get them posted every week?