Glyn Dewis Shares Key Tips For Shooting Composite Image Backgrounds

Curious how to properly shoot a background environment to drop a studio-photographed subject into? I know that is something I honestly struggled with early on. We regularly feature Glyn Dewis on Fstoppers, and recently he put together a quick and easy 2 minute video that gives crucial tips on how to make sure your focus/depth of field and angle of your background is captured correctly so it matches up with your portrait subject.

This video is great because it shares common sense, but these are elements often overlooked by people just getting into composite work. Some photographers will spend hours, even days, shooting background plates to use for composite shoots and shooting them properly will save you a lot of headache in post-production.

I just personally wrapped an in-studio photoshoot with NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Junior and his race car and am about to shoot some environments for my final composites using these same tips Glyn Dewis shared. I'll make sure to do another Fstoppers post when the final images from that shoot are complete!

Make sure to check out more of Glyn’s tutorials on his website: GlynDewis.com

Douglas Sonders's picture

Commercial Photographer (mainly Phase One medium format digital) and filmmaker based out of NYC. Started a site called Notabully.org to spread stories about well-behaved and positive pitbulls. Love cars, 80s movies, dogs, and adventure. Free time is spent traveling, sleeping, adventuring, or working on my baby, a 1969 Mustang Mach 1.

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7 Comments

I love these quick tutorials, perfect for when I am waiting on a comp to save. Plus, with things like this, its nice to hear them... even though I "know" it already.

I completely agree

That approach works well for when the background and the model have the same scale. If they aren't, things get a little more complicated. Albeit a little more technical then Glen's approach, I wrote a tutorial for keeping the right perspective when composing seemingly over-sized objects into a "normal-sized" scene. How do you guys handle these kinds of photo manipulation?

Good tutorial for someone who hasnt had any art/ design background.

Check out how major fashion brand Longchamp did their composite for the new ad campaign with the always world famous Coco Rocha. I always wondered how they pulled this off and now I get to see it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6PSbYAoi2E

and here is the video commercial.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybJ9_GZZ7Wc

That was the shíttíest "tutorial" video I've ever seen...