Composite Photos

For about a year I've been really working on honing my skills with composite photography.  During this time I've learned that I really enjoy it.  I enjoy for one simple reason.  Anything is possible. If you can't get it straight out of the camera, which is ideal in my opinion, you can do a little planning before hand and set it up so that you can get the shot that might not otherwise be possible, or likely, to achieve.



THE SCENARIO:

I  was asked to photography a bunch of promotional photos for a Girl Scout Camp.  One of the activities I was asked to photograph was rock climbing on their climbing wall. Ideally, I wanted to rig my SLR to the top of the climbing wall with a wide angle lens to get some really cool top-down angle shots of the girls climbing to the top and ringing the bell when they reached the top.  However,  my flexi-pod wasn't strong enough to support my big SLR camera.  This meant I had to use my point and shoot camera which didn't nearly have as wide of an angle lens and I would have liked. To complicate things, I was going to have to find a way to climb the camera to the top of the wall and secure it in such a way that it wouldn't suddenly decide to practice swan diving without water.  It should be noted that I am no poster child for any rock climbing magazine by any means.  I couldn't climb above the top anchor, which is where my camera needed to go, because of how the wall was set up.  I also, couldn't just clip in at the top, hang out, and take the photos myself.  This meant that I had to leave the camera up at the top, guess on how to frame the camera without being able to get a good view of LCD screen or viewfinder, let it take photos on an interval setting for about an hour, and hope that I got at least a few photos that were decent.

Hit & Miss:

After leaving the camera up at the top of the wall, and getting plenty of other shots from down bellow with my SLR,  I reviewed the nearly 120 photos that were captured.  As to be expected, the images were really hit & miss.  Unfortunately, there was a lot more misses than I would have liked.  I was beginning to get worried that the shot I had imagined in my head would not be realized due to circumstances beyond my control.  That is, until I saw these two photos.....

Plan B

I really liked about half of each of these photos.  Neither one was exactly what I was looking for, however, they were definitely in the ball park.  I really like the pose and facial expression of the girl on the right in the first photo, and I really liked the way the climber on the left filled the frame of the image while also framing the other climber.    Since, I didn't get my ultimate photo in camera, there was only one thing to do.... Plan B.

I had been banking on the fact that I might have to result to this contingency plan when setting up the shot.  From experience I've learned that with enough time and enough fore thought put into your planning phase you can eventually get the parts you need to make a composite version of the image you want.  If you do it correctly, and you don't show off what you've done, no one will suspect a thing.  They'll be blown away by your ability to capture such amazing "snap shots".

While composite work can get much more complicated than this simple composite, understanding what is possible, even from a simple snap shot, is really freeing to a photographer's creativity.  While I still prefer to get most of my photos done in camera, composition work is still a whole lot of fun.



The Final Image

Until next time,

-Cheers

Brian