Her Stolen Heart

I have a good “photographer / model” relationship with my friend Lauren.  She’s willing to pose for any photos I need, and she gets TFP – “time for prints.”  And as I started going over my pictures for competition season, I had an idea for a photograph that would make people do a double-take – and Lauren was more than happy to help me take the picture.

Background for the inspiration.

There’s a great Buster Keaton silent film called Sherlock, Jr. In this film, Keaton is chased by police detectives.  He’s trapped in an alley.  Suddenly someone walks into the alley – a person who is carrying an open suitcase full of products.  With nowhere to turn, Keaton actually dives INTO the suitcase and disappears.  Oh, did I tell you this film was made in 1924, so if you’re looking for any CGI tricks here, you won’t find them?

So what if there was a way to create a picture frame that Lauren could hold up and one could dive through it? Well… let’s augment that a bit. What if there was a picture frame that someone could stand behind, and the frame would make that person’s body invisible? You know… maybe a picture frame that would work as an X-ray machine or an invisibility cloak.

I know photographers have done this in the past. I’ve seen articles on how to create this optical illusion in Popular Photography magazine.  This is why you get a subscription to publications like that.

I want to try this photo-illusion now.

It took several trips to the local arts and hobby stores to find what I wanted – a 12″ styrofoam heart-shaped outline form.  I wrapped the heart form with reddish-orange duct tape, because white hearts won’t work for my photo project.

I wanted to find a heart-shaped candy box.  And it would have been easy to do so, had I not started searching in mid-June – four months after Valentine’s Day.  Yeah, that was about as successful as nothing.  Oh well.  I’ll work around it.

Sunday morning.  I meet up with Lauren, and we drive to a location on the Hudson River.  She takes the heart-shaped frame and starts posing.  And I start taking the pictures.

And among the shots I took – I got this one.

Yes.  That IS the Hudson River in the background.

And I got this one.

Wow.  That duct tape is plenty powerful, ain’t it?  I didn’t know the D700 had an X-ray feature built in.

Here’s another one.

Okay, the D700 doesn’t really possess X-ray abilities – and no, I didn’t use a pair of “X-Ray Specs” as a lens filter – but I’m sure you can figure out how I took this picture.

In fact, the information is in the caption.  Essentially I had Lauren pose with the heart, then had her walk out of frame while I photographed the background – and then digitally filled in the “heart” with whatever was in the background – clover, river, anything.  That’s why I brought my tripod with me – it allowed me to keep the camera stationary, so that I could drop the background into the heart without the final product looking askew or out of alignment.

And thanks to Lauren – and Buster Keaton – I now have another possible photo competition entry.