Levitating Vanessa

So this was another experiment. This time though, I wanted to levitated someone.

I have some of the craziest dreams. I can’t think of any other way to describe it other than I woke up one day from a trippy dream about a model slowly lifting out of a river and hovering over it. Feel free to tell me what that dream means. But this translated into me wanting to do a levitation shoot. From there I decided that I wanted to try out a different backdrop and have a model levitating in an art museum. 

Now, I subscribe to the school of thought that it’s better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission. This is how I’ve been able to shoot in a number of locations that would have never happened otherwise. Plus charm, a genuine smile, and being personable can get you a long way and can get you out of a lot of situations. Knowing this, I snuck a tripod and part of a studio set up into my local art museum. 

Well, that didn’t last too long and they found us within minutes and asked us to leave the equipment behind which made levitating my model difficult. In levitation photography a tripod is absolutely critical because you need to take multiple shots that are exactly the same. One shot of the background by itself. A couple of shots of the model sitting or laying on a chair in front of the background. And a couple shots of the models hair or clothes being manipulated to look like they’re floating. These all have to be perfectly aligned because you will be stitching them together in post. 

So without my tripod, I was out of luck. Buuuuuut I’m stubborn as sin so I still went ahead and tried to levitate my model by handholding my camera. Well, these are the results… (And then we went on to have a regular shoot becase handholding for that one shot was near impossible).