I have shot Rachel several times and so I approached her with a mockup of the image to see if she would be interested. She thought it would be quite fun so we scheduled a shoot.

I had always envisaged a Victorian style outfit and so I made one using a corset and then placing lave over a hoop skirt frame. I attached the ring to a belt for strings and positioned it at roughly same height as it appeared on the feeder.

I borrowed a handpainted canvas backdrop and set up a studio in the garage. I knew that the final image would be a composite but at that stage I was not sure whether I would leave the background as it was or replace it. One of the hardest things of bringing a person into a new scene is getting their feet to look right on the new surface. To make this process a lot easier I had collected leaves and I sprayed those around Rachel’s feet.

I also collected a number of nests during the previous year and we fixed one to Rachel’s head and she held the other one. It was the a simple matter of shooting her where she was interacting with birds that would be added later. I only provided minimal direction as Rachel is an experienced model. Plus I find that letting a model find their own rhythm makes for better images.

For the lighting I used two lights. My main light was a Godox AD600 in a 1.5m Octobox positioned at 90° to Rachel. The light was covered with a grid so that I could control the direction of it. This lighting positioned closely resembled the angle that the sun had been when the birds were photographed.

Although the image below shows it as a square was actually octagonal. On the opposite side to the main light I positioned a white polystyrene reflector to provide a bit of fill and at the rear of the studio I had an Elinchrom D400 firing into the 7 foot umbrella covered with diffusion. This was solely to fill-in the shadows. While Elinchrom and Godox lights operate on different triggers, I could use the optical slave on the Elinchrom and this worked really well.

All of the images on this page were shot with my Nikon D600 f7.1 1/200s ISO200 using a prime 50mm lens. The camera was mounted on a tripod that was set at the same height as when the birds were shot.

We also shot some images from a different angle but these were never taken any further in post.

You can see a behind the scenes video of the shoot below

In part three we will cover putting it all together.