Above Everything - International Women's Day + Levitation Photography Tutorial :)

Happy International Women's Day!

What better image to share than a beautiful, strong woman uplifting herself above everything.
And she happens to be my wife, which is awesome. :)

The picture was taken during a hike to the Mt. Snjeznik in Croatia. This is actually at the summit of the 1506m high mountain. And don't worry, she is far enough from the edge to tumble down :)

It is not so difficult to create this, you just have to plan a bit in advance. Obviously you need a chair or similar, to support your levitating subject. First take a shot without anyone or anything in the frame. This will give you a base in postproduction. In our case the scene looked like this:

Nikon D750 / ISO 200 / 1/640s / AF-S Nikkor 50mm 1.4G at f7.1

Tripod is a must in order to keep the camera steady. You will have to delete the chair from the image and you cannot allow camera movement otherwise you will get blurry artefacts on the image...

Then place the chair, safely and securely, especially if the shooting location is 1506m high mountain :)
Play with postures, only your imagination is the limit. We were creating an image to promote her, and she is a yoga teacher so we went in that dirrection...

She took the posture and it was time to snap away:

Nikon D750 / ISO 200 / 1/640s / AF-S Nikkor 50mm 1.4G at f7.1

Both images are imported to PS as layers. The empty frame image is the base layer, with the image with the subject as the layer on top of it. Then use the layer mask tool to delete the chair.
Everything related to this action is found on the following screenshot:

As I have described above, you can see the layers down and to the right. Empty frame is the base, and the subject is on top. Open a layer mask on top of that layer and use the black brush tool to delete unnecessary stuff from the image. You can see it's only partially deleted in the screenshot.

I recommend to shoot down on the subject (camera is higher than the subject). This will hide the support (the chair or whatever) and make it easier to delete in postproduction. If the supporting item was overlaping the subject, I would have more actions in removing it.

I allready did a similar tutorial, so if you like this one, check it out. It has a lot more interesting ''chair'' in it ;)

https://steemit.com/photography/@nkera/the-levitating-wife

So, take your camera and have some fun.

And, dear ladies, unfortunately the laws of physics will not allow you to float above mountain tops, but I wish you to feel like it every day ;)

Cheers,
Nino.