For those of you who follow me on my facebook page, you'll of seen I did a project related photo shoot with model, Matthew Holbeche.

The shoot comprised of three looks. White shirt, simple setup. Smart suit, (almost James Bond style) and then casual/fashion - cool looking. I have concepts in mind for all of these different looks, the idea being that I'd have enough options to work on.

I used several lighting setups for each of the different looks, starting with just one to keep things simple, and then adding others to create rim lights that look cool for simple backgrounds and work great for pulling off composits.

Here are a couple of the portraits I've already worked on.

Next is a composit. I shot this background a long while ago now and have struggled to find a portrait that would fit this scene until this shoot, where one of the portraits of Matthew jumped out as having potential. Quite often, before I spend hours cutting out subjects, applying enhancements, processing etc, I'll often have a quick play around to get a sense of whether I think it's going to work. If it does, I'll start from scratch and work through my normal processing steps, retouching, enhancing background etc.

Here is the background with very little processing applied:

Background prepped:

Out of camera shot of Matthew:

Test combining both elements:

And finally, the finished image:

I've got quite a bit of material to work with from this session, and several other compositing ideas to look forward to working on so keep an eye out as I'll be sharing more when finished.

Thanks for reading and thanks to Matthew Holbeche for doing an awesome job! Will be doing more work with him in the future!

Stu