Hopefully some of you read the first part of this blog post sharing the recent shoot and early results with singer and musician duo Cloud9. If you missed it you can read it here.

This is the second part where, as promised, I'm sharing the concept composited images with you. In all of these, the brief was to create a sense of drama and a bit of a gritty edge.

The Long Road: 

The background was captured in the New Forest and then created using software, although apart from a bit of cloning, I didn't need to do too much with it. The clouds were as they were, and I just added some light rays coming out of the cloud to the left. Then the fun began bringing in Julie and Gary and combining and blending them in with retouching and different compositing techniques to create the final image.

Dusty Tracks:

We knew before taking a single picture what kind of looks and backgrounds we wanted to capture and create, and a dusty road, path way was one of them. This background, also captured in the New Forest was perfect, with the gravelly stoney ground for me to add some dust in photoshop. A little bit of enhancement work was applied to this background and then just colour, before combining Julie and Gary.

London Skyline:

This last picture presented a bit of a challenge, in that I couldn't capture in one picture a rooftop foreground with a decent London skyline and dramatic clouds, so I had to pull in the roof and background elements in separately to create the final image. The nice thing about this is the background is that it's totally unique, given it doesn't exist! I'm going to create a short video showing the before and after's of this soon, so keep any eye out.

You can see larger versions of the pictures in the 'Concepts' photobook.

It was great fun and a real pleasure taking these pictures, creating these images and working with Julie and Gary to ensure the end results were what they needed.

Thanks for reading.

Stu