Sometimes it’s great to have a concept that doesn’t take a lot of production to do. Just a couple props & a bit of time. Even though I’m pretty busy almost all the time, I do try & shoot some of the things I want to in the evenings once the major rush has passed through the studio.

I had been carrying this idea around in my head for some time (along with a million others too). Seeing as this took very little production, it’s one of the ones I’ve managed to get around to first. All I needed was a goldfish in a bowl… and a goldfish hat. Thankfully with a couple calls I was able to track down a pet shop in the Cape Town CBD (one would be surprised how scarce they are!) that had a ‘goldfish starter kit’. Excellent. Not only did I have what I wanted, I now also had a complete kit for maintaining my new studio friend. The lady at the pet store was somewhat horrified at me when I asked if I could bring him back after the shoot. I guess this is the price this little guy has to pay for a minute of fame… living with me.

So other than the actual helmet on the goldfish, there was little PS that went into the final shot. Here’s the buildup to the final image:

The RAW shot of the bowl. Mr Goldfish was actually IN the bowl here, but he was swimming around at the back – so thats why you can’t see him.

I knew for the final layout I didn’t want a complete bowl showing. It wasn’t neccessary to convey the final message. So I moved it over in the frame, giving me some nice negative spacing for text & product placement.

I now added Mr Goldfish into the bowl from a seperate shot (at the exact same placement). This took a bit longer than I imagined. Goldfish don’t exactly swim in the direction you always want them to… and then also in a nice relaxed, non-threatened oh-gosh-somethings-chasing-me kind of fashion.

Next I popped over to Stock.Xchng to see what they had as far as helmets went. They’re a great royalty-free stock library! I eventually found this helmet, which I hoped would work out well. I had about another 8 options, but none of them had the straps & they all had the wrong perspective angle on the helmet for my Mr Goldfish.

A bit of photoshop-love later, we had our helmet on our fish. Took a fair amount of warp-tool to get it looking right. Added a shadow-cast that helped make it look real & a colour tinge to make it look convincing too. Other than this, the final image got a bit of colour correction & product added on right.