Pierre Stephenson was presenting a program on photographing underwater portraits. So being the shy guy that I am I asked if he could grab one of me cause I was looking for something different… And boy did I get that.

Pierre immediately said, “Yeah that would be great! I see you in a cross legged Buddha pose.” I’m all over it so off to the pool we go…

Because it was very hard to hold position this is two combined photos. One for the legs and lower half of the body and one for the upper half and reflection. Image © Pierre Stephenson used with permission.

When I showed Pierre the image (he gave me the files to play with) He said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you were in a grotto?” I remembered a photo in my files of a set of arches from a shoot in Tuscany and started work blending it into the underwater photo image.

Added the ‘Grotto-ish’ background using masks and blend modes in Adobe Photoshop.

With a bit more Adobe Photoshop tweaking and color work this is pretty close…

This is a case of playing with an idea and developing it through playing with ideas. Is this complete? Not yet. It needs some refining as most of this was done on small files with very quick selections. I’m going to check in and see if Pierre likes the direction I hope he likes it…

Yours in Photography,      Bob