Heart-fashioned shadows are an clean and flexible way to create a memorable Valentines' Day photo, and you can even print one to use as a homemade Valentines' Day card. This article will lay out the fundamentals at the back of creating high-quality heart-fashioned shadows on every occasion.
Supplies for Heart-Shaped Shadows
The supplies for casting and capturing heart-shaped shadows are quite simple: a larger-sized book with a lot of pages (large paperbacks are often more flexible) and a circle to cast the heart-shaped shadow. You can use any circular, see-through object to cast the shadows. Rings are popular choices, for their shape and romantic connotations. You can also use a variety of camera accessories that you might already have lying around. All of the heart-shaped shadows in this article were created with either a single extension tube orcolored filters.
Technique and Timing for Heart-Shaped Shadows
The trick behind creating the heart-shaped shadow is shooting near a bright window in the early morning or late afternoon. You want direct light from the sun to create the strongest shadows, and the lower the sun is in the sky, the longer and more prominent the shadow. Right now, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, a south-facing window is ideal, as the sun is farther south in the sky and casts long shadows during much of the day. Consider also shooting near a glass sliding door or other large window without panes, so you can avoid having window-pane shadows cluttering up your image.
The image above indicates one viable setup. (You can see I had to use a general window and try and shoot around the window-pane shadows.) You want to apply a huge e-book, opened toward the middle, with a view to get a good, symmetrical heart shadow. Here, I changed into the use of a Bible opened to the 1 Corinthians thirteen verses famous at weddings. Since this isn't near the middle of the ebook, you can see that I used a heavy bottle to barely prop up the pages at the right-hand aspect to better fit the curve of the left-hand facet pages.
Secret tip: you could need a bit assist getting your circle to live upright for your e book. The extension tube I used changed into wide sufficient that it may normally rise up and stay by itself without assistance, however the colored filters had been a good deal smaller and had a bent to right away fall over. I used tiny portions of a product called Mini-Hold, a wax adhesive created to maintain dollhouse fixtures and add-ons in area with out leaving residue. Two tiny dots wherein the filter touched the book have been sufficient to maintain the filter out upright and now not be seen within the final image.
Strategies and Reminders
Spend some time thinking about which book and which pages you might want to use for this type of shot. Depending on your angle and aperture, it may be possible to emphasize certain words or phrases in or around the shadow. (This is particularly easy when using a ring to cast shadows, as the smaller heart draws more attention to fewer words.)
These two shots were both taken using the book The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, which is a heart-warming tale of love, childhood, and the bond between people and stuffed animals. I really liked the idea behind top choice, showing the older couple meeting and welcoming Edward, but I felt like the color picture was a bit overwhelming and competed for attention with the heart. The bottom version still gave a hint of the story, in the blurring words and black and white picture, but the empty space gave more emphasis to the heart. I ended up choosing the second image for printing and creating my own Valentines' Day cards.
Also make sure to don't forget your point-of-view and aperture. Experiment with unique angles of capturing, such as straight on and greater off-targeted. Try getting better and lower and see how it impacts the feel of the very last shot. You ought to additionally attempt some distinctive apertures, each wide and narrow, to peer how the special depth of fields (region of the picture in awareness) changes the feel of the final image.
No need to limit yourself to just one shadow, either! Have fun combining multiples and see what kinds of effects you can create!
Bonus: Book-Heart Valentines' Day Idea
And, since you already have your camera and a large, floppy book out, why not try creating a heart-shaped book too? A large, paperback book works well, as you have lots of pages to work with. The trick here is finding the angle and heart-shape you want and then using a paperclip or small binder clip in the back to hold the heart-shape in place.
Did you try either of these techniques? How did they turn out? Share a link to your final image or homemade Valentines below.
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