Gary Land does some amazing composites. I searched the internet for tutorials and did not have much luck. Anyone have tutorials they could point me to?
www.garylandphotography.com
I posted the above in the post-processing forum but no response so I thought I would try here.
Omg this guy is amazing. These pictures just blow me away. 1 Thing I think is that he uses the sharpening tool in PS a lot. I think he exaggerates it on purpose to make the picture pop out.
“A lot of the stuff we’re doing now is layers and surrealism and plate work,” he says. “I had been doing that for years, but just doing it for myself because I thought it was cool. I thought it was cheating, so I never really took it seriously. And then I remember looking through a book of Sacha Waldman and Jim Fiscus, and I was like, ‘You know what, they’re making a living doing this. And I like doing this, so I’m going to start doing this again.’ Sure enough, I just started playing with shooting people on white seamlesses and bringing in backgrounds and ideas and things like that. And I’ve gotten pretty good at it at this point.”
I think what is most impressive is his ability to light the background (or shoot the background that is naturally lit) and then reproduce that background lighting for the composite subject to fit naturally into the scene. Alot of record keeping, measuring, and a finely tuned knowledge of light is what makes his composites so "believable". I would be very interested to see the process, but I imagine that is a closely guarded secret.
