How I Shot It

This is the finished image in an ad. Note that I have placed the company's logo on the motorcycle tank and curved it to fit the tank.

The main image was shot in San Diego, CA, the clouds are in Montana, the runway & plane are from Phoenix, AZ.

When I first saw the location I was shooting in a house just to the right. One thing I do is always look around the set and around the location for lighting opportunities. What I saw was a huge black cloud and the street running up into it, which if I was able to get everyone on set in time would have been dramatic.

Unfortunately the styling crew was not my crew, the client elected to hire all of the styling crew, and just did not have know enough to book top professional people. They went to hair salons to book make up & hair people. The new "Marketing" person the company hired decided she would be the wardrobe stylist, which she wasn't. She did pull some great wardrobe but she just could not work quickly.

So by the time they finished selecting the dress, adjusting the hair and make up etc. the massive black cloud had passed all of us by.

But I shot anyway because I knew I could do something to make it work. I liked the angle and attitude of the models.

The hardest part of doing any type of multiple image composition is making it look like it is real. Color is important to a fashion client so when I decided i wanted to have a magenta tinged sky I had to be sure it did not contaminate any of the boots & leather jacket.

i also added magenta colored highlights to the motorcycle's painted & chromed parts that would reflect normally reflected parts of the sky. Plus the concrete had to have a slight magenta cast. I also needed to add a reflection of the runway center line on the tank.

Total retouching time was about 25 hours. Most of that was spent in removing the background from the primary image.