Composite Photography

Li Wei has earned his way to recognition in China through his trademark gravity defying images. This video, recently featured by the Creators Project, gives a little behind the scenes glimpse of how Li Wei was inspired to pursue his aerial stunts and how his creative ideas have reflected the quickly changing culture and country around him.  

I have been learning a ton of video know how in the past few months from watching the tutorials over at VideoMaker. I recently shot a green screen video for some background compositing and didn't take as much time as I should have setting up the lights for the green screen (the subjects on the other hand were flawlessly lit, haha).

The Amazing Spider-Man has been out for about 2 weeks and has made 137 million dollars. I saw it last week and was really impressed by the special effects but I've never had a full understanding of what really goes into it. In this video Jerome Chen from Sony Imageworks takes us through the basics of creating an all CG fight scene. Check out the full post for 3 additional videos. 

As I continue my articles on interior, architectural, and real estate photography, I thought it would be interesting to see different approaches to shooting these types of subjects. So, for this month's article, I've invited a number of professional interior, architectural, and real estate photographers to share their images and techniques with everyone who reads Fstoppers.  

We've featured architectural photographer Mike Butler before, when he shot the Intercontinental Hotel in Miami, FL. This time, Mike heads to Bogota, Colombia, to shoot  the Virgilio Barco Library using a slew of hot lights and assistants.

Jeremy Cowart is the newest photographer to be featured as a part of Profoto's Master Series. In this video he explains his work flow of his well known Imogen Heap portrait. Jeremy thinks way outside the box with much of his work and he is a true artist at heart. Hopefully hearing him talk us through this shot will move you to find new ways to shoot whatever it is you do. Enjoy!

Pepsi Australia recently teamed up with Kelly Racing to produce the Pepsi Max super car. Photographer Chris Benny was hired to shoot the new car and lucky for us, he filmed a quick BTSV of the production. As with many shoots, the weather became a problem but Chris had a backup plan.

GoPro has become one of those companies like Redbull where everything they put out there is pretty cool. It has been fun seeing such a small startup become the industry leaders in tiny HD video cameras. With their new Wifi BacPac, GoPro gives users the ability to control their cameras through tablets like the iPad and smart phones.

Have you ever been going through the magazine rack of your local book store and just stood staring at the cover of a car magazine? No? Ok, well maybe that's just me. But when I see a photo of a blazingly fast sports car clinging to the corner of a race track it certainly piques my interest. Even if you aren't a "car person" chances are you have at least wondered how these cover shots are made.

Check out this high-resolution zoomable panoramic photo taken right after the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. Shot from a kite 2000 feet over San Francisco Bay, the detail is jaw-dropping and the scene after the disaster is otherworldly.  

Trey Ratcliff is perhaps one of the most well known and adored HDR photographers today. The High Dynamic Range images he creates are not subtle by any means and he takes no apologies when it comes to creating images he personally enjoys.

Photographing birds out in the wild seems pretty tough. Oregon photographer Jon Myers wanted to make the challenge even tougher by bringing the birds into his studio. Using large softboxes to create a space for the birds to fly, Jon was able to photograph eagles, ospreys, and hawks perfectly while in flight.

This is what it looks like when day and night meet in a single image. Including the prep time, it took photographer Chris Kotsiopoloulos thirty hours to capture the hundreds photos needed to stitch this together. The shot was taken in Sounio, Greece. It got so cold at times that he had to use a hairdryer to keep the lens from fogging up. See the full post for more details! 

Our good friend Blair Bunting is at it again. This time Blair was hired to shoot the ad campaign for The Discovery Channels hit show River Monsters. The concept was relatively simple; to have the show’s host Jeremy Wade wrestling a giant fish in the shallow waters near South Beach, Florida. To do this Blair's team used a fake fish that was then replaced in post.

If you grew up during the late 1980s through early 1990s, then you can remember the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Using a combination of action figures, about 60 hand-drawn backdrops, and over 4,000 individual images, director Kyle Roberts pays tribute to this classic cartoon with a stop motion animation. This is one you won't want to miss.   See how it was done in the video below.

Commercial photographer Dean Bradshaw provides us with a unique perspective of his recent photo shoot for "Startrac". The shoot involved a handful of athletes being shot while mock competing in their individual sports.

Fstoppers.com has featured some great behind the scenes videos over the years and showcased amazingly talented professional photographers in our Fstoppers Originals series. Recently Patrick and I were invited to Scottsdale, Arizona to expose the secrets of commercial photographer Blair Bunting.

Today, Pocket Wizard rolled out the newest in their line of wireless flash triggering devices: the long-awaited update to the industry standard Pocket Wizard Plus II, the Pocket Wizard Plus III. We at Fstoppers have been playing with them for awhile, and we're here to give you all the details, including an exclusive video look at the new Pocket Wizard Plus III.

At a recent TED Talk, conceptual photographer Erik Johansson broke down his approach and method into a bite-size chat. While many photographers consider their work finished as soon as they hit the shutter button, apply contrast, and upload to Flickr, Erik decides to take it further (quite a bit further, in fact). His images make you stop and think and may take a few minutes to sink in.

This day at Teahupoo- Aug 27th 2011 during the Billabong Pro waiting period is what many are calling the biggest and gnarliest Teahupoo ever ridden. Chris Bryan was fortunate enough to be there working for Billabong on a day that will go down in the history of big wave surfing.

Have you ever wondered just how many photographs are taken each day? Maybe you've wondered where the most photos are taken throughout the world. Well the GPS data tracking company Triposo has released a timelapse video that shows exactly where most of the world's photographs are taken.

Check out this video from Corridor Digital! I love graffiti and street art, and it's a great lesson to all of us on how mixing and matching media can make an addictive, fun video. The fake door shot reminds me of so many shows and cartoons I saw growing up. If you think about it, they mixed graffiti, acting, and stills for an awesome end product.

Amy Lynn must really want to win some of the $20,000 in photo gear we are giving away in our Behind the Scenes Contest because the photoshoot idea she came up with is one of the most original ideas we've seen yet! Amy wanted to create a fashion image with a twist.

We are heading into the final stretch for our 2011 Behind The Scenes Contest and someone is about to win a truckload of gear! The latest video that caught my attention was from LA photographer Mike Kelley. Mike has been featured on our site before but in case you missed that post, his portfolio is full of some pretty kick ass commercial images of buildings and outdoor environments.

I just realized that our Fstoppers Twitter account has tons of unread direct messages (we prefer you email us). One of them was from Douglas Sonders who had a crazy experience with one of the original Ghostbusters Ecto 1 Cadillacs. These caddies have so many lights on them that I can't make any sense of what is going on but it looks pretty cool.

It seems every week someone is producing a piece of art that pushes the limits of both technology and also creativity. One trend has been to create commercials and videos completely in camera with minimal post processing. The new music video for Kina Grannis completely blows my mind!

Jay P. Morgan is a commercial photographer based out in Los Angeles. His behind the scenes videos have been a hit with our readers because they always feature some useful lighting or photoshopping technique. In his latest video, Jay shuts down a highway ramp in order to light an 18 wheeler truck against the LA skyline.

Joel Grimes is a commercial advertising photographer who is most known for his composite portraits. In his recent interview with [Framed], Joel discusses how he got started with his career, how he uses 16bit HDR images in his workflow, does a full photoshoot, and even shows off his musical talents. The video is long so take your time watching it because he gives a lot of useful tips.

Jay P Morgan is a commercial photographer out of California who has a history of creating some of the best most educational behind the scenes videos out on the internet (click here to watch tons of them). In this video Jay explains how you can shoot athletes in a studio environment and composite them into any scene easily and effectively.

The amount of effort that went into Sony's 3D commercial Two Worlds is pretty unbelievable. I've watched this video twice now and still don't know if I know what I'm seeing. The creative team filmed the actors at 2500 FPS which required more than half a million watts of lighting and some of the largest fabric grids I've ever seen.

Awhile back we shared a few videos of photographers intentionally throwing their cameras in the air. Well now the Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera actually makes that feat much easier. The new camera allows photographers to create 360 degree images with 36 individual cameras arranged in a buckeyball shape (any organic chemists out there?).

Now this isn't your normal behind the scenes video. The guys over at Jess3, a creative agency, were asked by ESPN to create a video that explains how the Nielsen television rating system works.

Eric Curry is a photographer who specializes in painting with light. Unlike using strobes to exposure your photos, painting with light requires you to use long exposures and constant light sources to effectively "paint" over your subject and capture it on your sensor.

Ryan Enn Hughes just submited his entry for our BTSV contest and it is quite impressive. Ryan teamed up with The Big Freeze and set up 48 D700 cameras in a circle and then fired them all at once as dancers did their thing.

Strobist has an interesting article by architectural photographer Mike Kelley. Usually exterior shots of homes and buildings are simply too large to effectively light with speedlights or big power packs. The tried and true method of capturing a great looking exterior shot is to turn all the lights on in the building and wait for the ambient sky light to match the build's artificial light.

I have to thank Tyler Kaufman for turning me onto this next video. Sports photographer Peter Read Miller recently shot some of the top NCAA college football players for the latest issue of Sports Illustrated.

A big part of what makes commercial photography so interesting is it often requires photographers to incorporate the latest graphic trends into their work. In other words, in order to cut the mustard in commercial photography, you not only have to be at the top of your game but you also have to produce something eye catching in a market full of interesting media.

Nobody's face is perfectly symmetrical but it's very difficult for our brains to notice the differences in each side. Jesper Petersson recently worked on a unique project that involved shooting a group of people and then using each side of their face to create two new, perfectly symmetrical faces. It's really shocking to see how different each side of a face can be.

Telstra, an Australian wireless carrier, recently produced an ad for the Motorola Zoom tablet. Instead of creating everything with computers in post, the team created most of the moving sets by hand. The question then becomes; was their effort worth it? Can consumers even tell that much of this is real or does the average person consider everything to be fake these days?

In this weeks episode of The Slanted Lens, Jay P. Morgan shows us how to light and photograph a glass bottle. This video is also about superimposing products into real scenes so that the product looks it's best. Tutorials like this are priceless for anyone who is interested in product photography. Glass can be extremely tricky but Jay makes things super simple for us.

If you have seen Peter Lik's work in person then you understand that it's impossible to put into words the look and quality of his prints. Peter's photography (and his post production) is fantastic, but what really makes his work stand out is his printing and presentation. If his images were printed on standard photo paper at a standard size, his work would not have the same "wow" factor.

Usually when I hear someone is shooting a sexy calendar my stomach churns a bit as I imagine poor photography, less than stunning models, and ridiculously boring scenes. Thankfully this military themed calendar from Hot Shots is definitely not one of those poorly executed photoshoots.

Hurricane Irene is battering the East Coast of the US right now which has left many stuck in their homes browsing the internet for storm updates. One particular story that has filled my facebook news feed and was tweeted by CNN involves a shark swimming in the streets of Puerto Rico.

If you are a fan of iphone photo apps, huge CGI production movies, and sexy girls fighting with mystical powers then you will probably love this behind the scenes video. The Demon Cam is an iphone app that allows you to turn your face into a demon zombie.

Now I'm not exactly sure what the "largest stop motion animation" actually means but there is no doubt this video is pretty spectacular. You may remember Aardman Productions from our post on the world's smallest stop motion video which is equally as mind blowing. This time they decided to use the beach as their canvas and film the entire animation on a Nokia N8 cell phone.

Within 24 hours of announcing the Fstoppers 2011 Behind The Scenes Video Contest, we were shocked to already have our first submission. Marc Kuyer from Holland had an idea to have small model cars battling each other like they were straight out of Rock and Roll Racing (super cult classic).

We have featured a lot of Dave Hill's unbelievable photoshoots here on Fstoppers. So when I saw his Adventure Series posted over at Strobist I thought it was an older video. Oh how I was wrong....way wrong! In his latest video, Dave Hill places his composite images into an After Effects type environment and lets you see every layer and all it's photoshopped glory.