Faking Rihanna

Have you seen the cool album cover of Rihanna's Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded? On a lazy Saturday last month, I created a version of it with Amy. Though they look nothing alike and Amy doesn't own a white dress, I saw potential for some photographic fun! My first problem was how to recreate the extreme body lean. The solution was simple, although the implementation was not: ask Amy to lean against the wall (easy) and use Photoshop to remove the wall propping her up (hard). In Photoshop, I had to give Amy a haircut and redraw her body a bit. :-) The second problem involved lighting. Because I wanted the light to wrap around her and gradually end in shadow, I needed large directional lighting (I used a flash shot through an umbrella). Unfortunately the light bounced off the wall and lit the far side of Amy's body and arms. This was not good, because these parts of her had to remain dark to match Rihanna's photo. The key was to gaffer tape the black cover of my reflector to the wall and have Amy lean against it. This served to "eat up" all the light on the far side of Amy and therefore leave that part of her in shadows. The other problems involved replacing the wall behind Amy with a blueish green background and adding the shadow behind her. This shadow actually took a lot of time for me to create in Photoshop, because I'm not very adept at creating gradients. I love trying to reproduce other people's images, because it forces me to stretch my abilities. The shadow behind Amy alone took me at least an hour! Check out the set on Flickr and see me impersonating Rihanna too!