How to Shoot a Composite Image

Here's a fun and easy way to create really interesting and unique images.

You need a tripod, a wide angle lens, a speedlight (you may get away without depending on the lighting conditions), some willing subjects and a handfull of rather straightforward photoshop techniques.This blog is just about how to set up and shoot an image like this, the next will cover the photoshop techniques you will need.

1. A little bit of planning will help so have a good think about the scene that you're intended to shoot.  You don't need to go overboard but just remember that an interesting shot of this type will generally have things happening in the background, midground and forground.
2. Set your camera up on a tripod in a corner of the room, go as wide as you can with your lens (this was shot at 24mm with a 24 - 70) and if you can, shoot a speedlight through an umbrella in the corner of the room that isn't in the shot.  So in the shot above I had one light to my right which was as high as I could get pointing diagonally into the room.
3. You will need to have everything in focus whilst shooting so reduce your aperture to the smallest you can get away with...so that's the larger numbers.  Around F18 will probably do.  At these apertures you will very easily get blurred images so it is imperative that you use a tripod to stop camera shake.
4. Keep your ISO as low as you can.
5. Take a shot of the room with no one in it.  Focus on something mid way in the room if possible - this will help you have all of the room in focus.  This image can be used as a canvas to then layer images of people over the top.  Once you have the background you can open up the aperture a bit.  The people in the shot were taken at f5 at a 60th of a second with flash to freeze the action.
6. The next bit is the fun bit.  What you'll need to do is try and imagine the scene as discrete areas of action that you'll want to join together.  So with this scene I had each person on their own in the room and got them to move clockwise (counter clockwise works just as well) taking on different poses as they went and making sure that the interesting action happened in the mid, back and foreground.
7. Whilst taking the pictures be sooo very careful that you don't knock the camera.  Use the focus points to track your subjects around the room.  It's tricky but with a bit of practice you'll get there.
8. Step 6 was actually just a bit of an insurance policy.  Those images can be used to fill gaps.  If you are lucky you will be able to create your image with just 3 or 4 mini group shots.  The way to do this is to have all your subjects in one area doing different things.  So for the shot above I had the three of them on the couch and took 3 or four shots of them jumping about and messing around. I then moved them to the next couch took 3 or four shots and so on.  Working them around the room making sure each section of the room was covered.

The thing with this type of shot is to have fun with it and really get your subjects to understand that they can be interacting with themselves on the other side of the room...so tell them to be as expressive and crazy as they like.  The scene itself does not have to make sense, that's the point.

Once you are happy with the process and your settings you will quickly realise that the trick is to take enough shots to give you a degree of compositional freedom in post processing, but not too many that the selection process and compositing becomes arduous.

Have fun capturing your images for your composite shot.  People tend to love these so it is well worth having a go.

I'll be back in a couple of days with the second half of this blog dealing with how to knit together the images that you have taken to result in a masterpiece composite.