Poker Quartet

By PF Staff in Favorite Photos on Dec 12, 2012

One of my favorite photography projects, is creating scenarios where a single "actor" appears several times in the frame, in  different poses or appearances. Over the years, I did several such projects, sometimes myself as the "actor", often  a grandchild who happened to be visiting us, and in the right state of mind for having some fun with grandpa…

The "Poker Quartet" shown here is one that I like most. Taken on a winter evening of 2009, at my home  roof terrace:

Once I have the idea of the scene, the procedure is actually quite simple.

1. The setup is prepared, in this case a table, deck of cards, bottles, glasses, cigars & pipes, several changes of shirts and caps.
2. Camera on a steady tripod, remote  shutter activation, fixed manual exposure and focus settings, then ready to go.
3. The general scene is unchanged (very important !), only the actor moves around, then taking a few clicks in each new position.
4. Selected shot from each position is then loaded as a new layer in Photoshop CS4, Since all layers are identical, except for the card player, a straightforward partial masking of layers brings in the combined scenario.

With a little experience, it works great and it is a lot of fun to do…

This set was taken with my Pentax K20D + DA*16-50 F2.8 @22mm, exposure was 1/15sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, -0.7 compensation. 2 halogen 250W plain projectors were used from top left & top right.

I am attaching a set of the 4 selected frames, before they were layered & combined in Photoshop.

- Itzik