First: gather materials--fake flower, big vase filled with water, white posterboard, black seamless photo paper
Second: take face picture--set posterboard up, stood in front of it, used flash on posterboard so I'd be dark, took picture.
Third: edit face picture--moved into Compupic pro and boosted contrast, black point, and white point into oblivion. Then, converted to B&W (Still some specks of color) and put it into elements to clone out anything that didn't contribute to its blackness.
Forth: Make prints--Using the laser printer and cardstock paper, plus a quick invert of the image to get it so they'd face eachother, I printed two out. Then, I used a boxcutter to remove the white part of the paper so I'd have the two cutouts. Using another piece of cardstock, I made stands for the pictures and eyed it to make sure they were even (I probably should've measured :P) and set them up in front of the vase.
Fifth: Final touches--I taped the photo paper around the posterbard behind the scene while using the remote to take a picture. As for lighting, I used one flourescent light shining from the top left, one from the bottom left, and I shone a maglite into the vase to illuminate the bubbles. To keep the flower's stem from going out of the vase in view, I hot glued it to the side of the vase and again on the top, to keep it in that position. I took about 50 different shots with the lights in various positions, one with no lights at all. This is the one I went with.
Sixth: Post processing--First things first, I cropped it. Then, in CompuPic pro, I jostled with the black point a littleto see if I could save myself some work (and fix those blown highlights on the flower...ugh). Then, once I had pushed that do all desperation, I burned the blackest part of the image. After that, I simply used burn and clone tool to make it look like the background and the faces were one, and to furthermore emphasize that the overlap that the flower and leaves do on the faces. And also, I cloned out some reflections on the vase. I'm fairly satisfied with the result.
My main goal is to try and move my pictures more towards graphicfunk's genre... cool pictures that make you think "How'd they do that?" Also, I'd like to try and incorporate my unique sense of humor into all or at least most of my shots, but I'll worry about that later.
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