I ran across a great image in Flickr one day that, as is often the case, inspired me to play around a bit. The photo I found was of a young girl laying down in a box with the illusion that her legs had disappeared – the photo displayed above was the final product in my attempt to recreate the Flickr photo (I really wish I saved that link – I wasn’t able to find it again – just my luck). It didn’t turn out quite as well as the one I saw, but it demonstrates the effect well.

I also did this because one of the models I use most often love to see her picture. After I showed her the picture, I think she liked it even more than I did! She got a big kick out of the fact that I could make her legs disappear.

This two part series will cover the process I used to create the photo. In this, the first post, I’ll review what I did during the shoot. The second post will cover how I finished the effect in Photoshop.

What You’ll Need

It doesn’t take a lot of expensive equipment to do this – at least on the camera side of things. I used:

• Camera – I used a Canon Rebel XT, but a point and shoot would work fine.
• Tripod (or a box, pillow, etc. to set your camera on)
• Box
• Clean space – the effect works nicely on a hardwood floor, but you could do it anywhere.
• Cute kid
• Elbow pads – this may not be necessary for everyone, but it took me a few minutes to get everything worked out and my model’s elbows started hurting.
• Lighting equipment. You definately do NOT NEED this. I placed a small hot shoe flash (Canon’s 430 EX, triggered by a transmitter on my camera) and an umbrella to her left to create some directional light. You could easily place things next to a large window or other soft light source.

The Shoot

The shoot was the easiest part of the whole process and took a little less than 15 minutes. You can reference a few of the shots directly out of the camera, shown below.

1. I started by taking a medium-sized box and pushing the inside flaps up inside the box. You can actually see one of the flaps behind her head. In retrospect, I should have cut that one flap off. Leaving the others is important, though, as it helps keep the box rigid and in a proper shape.
2. I angled the box appropriately, making sure that the back was not visible and that you couldn’t see through to the back of the box from the front (you would end up seeing the wall behind). At this point, it is important to make sure the box doesn’t shift through the rest of the shoot.
3. I placed the camera on a tripod about 8 feet away. I then composed the shot as you see. If you don’t have a tripod, you could easily use another box or other solid object. Like the box, you’ll want to make sure that your camera doesn’t move for the rest of the shoot (this backfired a bit on me – read on for more about that).
4. MY EXTRA STEP – I then set up my light/umbrella to camera left at about 45 degrees. If you don’t have an off camera flash, position everything near a large window.
5. First, I took several frames of the empty box (see Picture 1).
6. I then held my hand on the box (so it didn’t move) and asked my model to slide in, as shown in Picture 2. I took shots of several different poses with her in the box. Ideally, the two shots should be at the exact same perspective, zoom, etc. – one with the model in, one without.

   Unfortunately, while I kept the box still and had my camera on the tripod, I didn’t have a monitor for another young one wandering around the room, who bumped into my tripod in between shots. Normally, I would have started things over, but my model was done with it. I still had a decent perspective (the box is roughly at the same perspective). The shot was at a different magnification and rotation – two things I can fix it Photoshop. I don’t like to do that in most cases as it takes more time to do it in Photoshop than to get it right in the camera, but I really wanted to move past the shoot and see how it would turn out – the girl felt the same way. The two pictures should give a good enough idea of what this stage is trying to accomplish though.

That’s it for this step – now that we have these shots we can move to the computer. Stay tuned for the post 2 in the series for what to do next.

Picture 1 – Click for a larger view.

Picture 2 – Click for a Larger View
(Picture 2 should be the exact same as Picture 1, just with a person in it – see step 6 above to learn why they aren’t the exact same).