Conceptual Family Portraits...Super Powers

Everyone knows that super moms have to be in 5 places at once. Little boys run around with their hair on fire, climbing walls, and jumping fences in single bounds. Teenage girls have a super-human ability to ignore everything outside their own little world.

That was the theme for this round of conceptual family portraits.

I wanted to showcase individual characteristics of each family member, and celebrate a little bit of what makes them unique inside the family unit. While I was talking to mom, she and I discussed each family member, what they love and the things they did that made them distinctive. One son was constantly climbing, the other loved soccer, the little guy was in constant motion, the baby rode his little four-wheeler like a speed demon, and the teenage daughter seemed to be able to ignore anything while she was on her phone.

I brainstormed and story boarded, trying to figure out how I would visualize each person and their distinct super power. I had to decide how to light them, how to shoot so that the powers were believable AND so that the editing could be seamless, and what my editing techniques would be.

Images like this require shooting on a tripod, because compositing several images from the same point of view needs to be seamless.

The photos were all composites of at least two and up to 5 or more photos. That was just the beginning.




Here are a few untouched examples of what was happening behind the scenes...

 Mom is here holding a piece of plexiglass so that we could get the right effect for the "privacy force field"

This is the close up photo after I had taken 6 images of the room in order to make a clean composite

Even Super Dads get overwhelmed sometimes...

It's so true to life that no matter how well we plan, life will throw curve balls...like sick, crabby babies who don't care that it's time for family photos, and diffusion panels that don't cover quite as much area as you expected them to. At the end of the day, you've got to be able to roll with the punches, and that is just what we did.

After much compositing, masking, and other assorted editing techniques that I won't bore you with...here are the finished images :)

These were great fun, and the end result says so much about each member of the family. What would YOUR super power be?