I have watched with interest as a contact of mine, BlackDog1966, has been working with composites where the background plates were digitally rendered 3D scenes using the Daz Studio (Free software). I have also been a long time follower of Joel Grimes and enjoyed his techniques of shooting gritty background plates to drop his subjects into.
I finally had the opportunity to have my own play with these kinds of techniques, although this was somewhat forced upon me through not having shot anything for my 52 photo this week, due to the back problems that I have been experiencing of late. So, although this composite doesn’t contain any new photographs from this week, it could well end up being my week 45 contribution. I won’t feel too bad about that though as I have put a fair number of hours into producing this image and (almost) every minute has been thoroughly enjoyable. I say almost, because there were one or two teething issues getting the Daz Studio models to install correctly for some of those minutes!
It was a good learning experience too. Most of the time was spent installing and learning my way around Daz Studio, then setting up the scene. I rendered it to a 32bit PNG file which supports transparency so you can see through the gaps through the gate and fencing. That made it simple to drop a photograph of a tree lined pathway from Clumber Park in as a background as no masking was necessary. I then extracted a photo of the car from an earlier photograph that I had made (See strobist details). Finally, I used Red Giant Software’s Knoll Light Factory to create the lamp lights and played around for a while with the colours and contrast until the car looked like it belongs in the scene (I still need to work on that aspect, especially the car shadow).
More details of the images used for this composite can be found here.
Strobist:
The car was lit with multiple pops from a single strobe:
Ranger A Head, A port at 7.5, 21cm reflector, all around the car.
Triggered by Skyport Speed.
Posted by ksten on 2012-11-09 13:55:59
Tagged: , Canon EF 17-40mm f/4 L USM , Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM , Elinchrom , Ranger , 21cm Reflector , Skyport Speed , MB , Mercedes , Benz , Mercedes Benz , C63 AMG PPP , Car , Extrior , Diamond White , Composite , Multiple Flashes , Automotive Lighting , Automotive Photography , DAZ3D , 3D Render , Virtual Background , Cemetary , Gates , Lights , Woods , Trees , Leaves , Experiment , Playing , Post Production , Photoshop CS5 , Strobist
