BREAKING NEWS Photographer sets up witty family portrait. Baby floats away!

I recently took this photo of my family in front of our new home and posted it on my facebook as well as emailed to family to announce the great news that we are expecting a new baby. What I fund to be pretty hilarious was the fact that every time I showed the image to someone, the first response was "How did you do that" or you are crazy to hang your baby by balloons like that. So after a few times of having to explain how I did the shot, I started playing around and making up stories. Like, "Yeah, we found it took exactly 135 balloons to keep her level. We had made the mistake of putting 140, and thank God she floated into a tree limb and some balloons popped or else we would have been in big trouble..."

Other stories went like, "Yeah, the tough part was the wind. We would position her there, but the wind would push her back and by the time we noticed she would be floating towards the neighbors house."

But before anybody starts calling child protective services I would explain that maybe (just maybe) I might actually be good at Photoshop as well.

To me, it isn't like it's a huge secret. In fact, I think it is safe to now make the same statement that has stood true for photography in general, It's not the camera (or computer software) that makes a great picture, but rather the photographer (or operator) using it.

I had this idea in my head for a while, but never saw an opportunity (or was probably too lazy) to buy a ton of balloons to do it. But we were recently at a relative's baby shower and they had all these balloons there. After the party they were going to just let the balloons go away. Knowing what would happen if I didn't take advantage of the opportunity I asked to take them instead.
Because (over the many years of doing this) I have gotten pretty good at being able to reverse engineer an idea which is pretty important when dealing with the nature of a 10-month old daughter in the hot sun.

So as you can see, NO I did not hang my baby from a bunch of balloons. What kind of idiot does that??? I took this photo as is on a tripod. The important part is to make sure your tripod, lens, exposure, etc does not change. This can make life a ton easier.


Then I took the shot of us without the baby in the background. Notice that with this picture I now have a clean background to work with for later.

Other shots are filler balloons.

I then opened them all in photoshop, placed them all onto one canvas as layers then made working masks for each.
After that it is simply choosing one layer at a time and erasing what you don't want in that layer and keeping what you want.
Of course this makes it sound easy and please remember I've been using photoshop since it was version 2.0, but honestly it is a simple concept that (with a little bit of practice) can provide great results.
The final touch was selecting the green balloons and replacing colors to pink.

I hope this helps. And maybe hopefully I will start to have more time for blogging soon. That is until the new baby is born...

Aa