CONFESSION ONE: THIAGO'S WALL

Final Image

That I ever attempted this transformation still makes me shiver. My problem, the opportunity of a great shot denied me by a stubbornly short wall to carry that dramatic shadow cast by a right placed remote slave. At first I asked the model (Thiago Drewry) to place himself lower than the steps, but still the wall was too low (bloody city developers!) and I’d lose the diagonal lead in of those steps.

Anyway, I sat on the shot for a couple months and then over a Christmas break when I had more time, I thought I'd expand my limited photoshop skills and see what I could achieve.

Starter Image

The objective to continue the wall and replicate the shadow.

First task was to rebuild that wall with only the clear area on the left to work from (see left). The trickiest thing of all perhaps was to marry the different layers together so that the lines of the marble blocks joined correctly with their neighbours both horizontally and vertically. This involved a lot of manipulation in the transform mode. The next challenge then was to tweak the brightness of the wall samples - taken from the brighter side of the image - to match with their new home on the darker side of the picture. I don’t think I pulled this off perfectly, but I knew also that the new wall was completely plausible so I’d just about get away with it.

Brick by brick, step by step

Now the final brick in the wall wasn’t a brick at all, but the shadow. Technically, not all that difficult - I selected the upper part of the model, copied and pasted that into a new layer then turned it to black, however the real work began in joining the fake shadow to the real shadow. As before, there was no point attempting this if you could see the joins. In tailoring, after all, the whole point of invisible mending is that it is invisible.

Location

People often want to know where I took the shot.  The answer is a surprisingly uninspiring location.  It's the walkway that leads up to St.Paul's Cathedral on the south side.  There you'll find 'the wall'.

Peter's Hill

More shots from this shoot: