I bought a pack of cheap tennis balls a while back for another photo project, and they got a further outing this week. I had the LSH (Long Suffering Husband) wet the ball, then spin it, against my usual black back-drop.
Although he put a pretty good spin on it, once I got the image into Photoshop, I still felt it was lacking something, so I decided it would look better with a more natural background. Every now and again I go around with my long lens and create files of out-of-focus bokeh which I can then use as background replacements in PS. I picked a greenish image and added the dark tennis ball image as a new layer in Photoshop using Blending Modes on Screen (plus a wee bit of masking as these automated things are rarely completely accurate).
I still felt it didn't have the punch I wanted – it needed a racket. We don't play tennis, but we did once upon a time have the odd game of badminton. I had David hold the racket against the black background again.
The only problem was, it looked all wrong having a tennis ball with a badminton racket. As I don't know any tennis players, I had to improvise. Photoshop to the rescue again with Edit–Transform-Distort, plus a bit of shortening of the handle.
This time it was a bit more difficult to add it seamlessly to the image, so I used a bit of Photoshop jiggery-pokery (this translates to “I can't remember exactly how I bodged it”).
Job done!
