How I became a real fruit ninja (weekend project)

I know Adam Frimer is no ninja, so when I saw this photo pop on his profile, I had to ask for a short tutorial. Turns out it is quite a fun project that you can easily do with your kids on a rainy weekend (sans holding the knife).

Here is a pictorial outlining the process:

But just before we start, make sure you set your camera on a nice sturdy tripod

1. this is the background plate. we will arrange everything on this basic photo, In hindsight, I may have used a more leveled photo :) I am shooting at f/8, 1/200 @ ISO 800

This is the fun part, getting a banana on a string. I actually think that I am going to start a band by this name. Anyway, I shot the banana on a string with a strobe on the bottom for some dramatic effect. THere is a muffler on the strobe as even at 1/128 it was too bright

strings and hands removed by masking them out in photoshop. the background layer makes sure there are no “holes” in the photo.

Here is a shot of my hand holding the knife. It looks still (it is…), are are going to take care of this in a few seconds.

This is the same layer with added motion blur and moved slightly upwards. Then everything but my hand was masked out so only my hand will “move”

This is the element I used for the swish – it’s a shape I drew with the pen tool with a deep bevel and an inner shadow. I lowered the opacity and added motion blur and some gaussian blur to give a swish effect. I then made the first iteration a little more evident and copy/pasted and lowered opacity down the row to give the impression of movement