Photographing Comic Book Heroines

Heroines have been around for years in comic books, movies and photography. Doing a photography project around recording images of women dressed up in heroine outfits and acting out typical heroine routines should not be that difficult.

Off course for most of the photographs you should add an element of realism and the easiest way of doing this is by adding a digital background to the finished photographs post production. The backgrounds should reflect situation that complement the original theme like tall buildings, or basically any "dangerous" situation and since this is a project based entirety on fantasy, adding digital effects is almost a must.

First of all you need to select the models who will be acting out the heroine characters. If you research various mediums like movies and even comic books, each heroine has a particular look.

Your models should fit this look as closely as possible in order to make the project seem an actual representation of the theme. depending on the character that you choose to represent you may need to seek out models who are very fit and often muscular yet most heroines are always shown as being beautiful ladies so this is also a consideration to take into account.

The costumes can be store bought will you will benefit by adding some touches to them thus making seem more realistic and not so much as a simple store bought one that you would use for Halloween. A good tailor can actually take these costumes and make them fit properly since the major issue with most store bought costumes are a one size fits all product and they rarely fit well.

Props can be bought too but again, the project will benefit if they are hand made since you can carefully make details stand out and anything hand made is always better than anything that is store bought.

Take Hollywood for example. they never buy their props, they are always made specifically for the particular movie to match detailed specifications. You may not have the budget to hire expert prop makers, but you will be surprised at what you can do with some preparations and some skills.

Since the theme involves photographing models made to look like comic book heroines a good technique is to edit the images digitally to enhance the color, use filters to make them appear as drawn by pencil and add other digital elements as well.

For photographing use a regular set up and light sources. A flash bounced from the ceiling and a photo lamp placed by the side at a 45 degree angle should be enough. Because you more than likely will have to add a digital background a better technique is to pose the models and photograph them against a green backdrop, usually referred to in the business as a chroma key green. This makes it easier to add digital effects afterwards.