In my mind, the process of creating a compelling composite image is as close to painting as a photographer can get: it allows you to create almost purely from imagination, not being constricted by physical locations as with traditional photography.

Last summer, I had a shoot with a few friends while we were staying at a cabin over the weekend. This was a low-key, just-for-fun shoot in some creepy woods near the cabin. Here’s another shot from that day, which I uploaded to Instagram:

Walk, do not run, to the nearest exit. Last weekend we had another #cabinphotoshoots session. This time, the goal was a creepy shoot in the creepiest woods, which are next to an abandoned farm a couple km from the cabin. . . . #creepy #theimaged #agameoftones #metsässä

A photo posted by Aaro Keipi (@aarokeipi) on Jul 27, 2016 at 4:01pm PDT

For this shoot, the model was lit with a Nikon SB700 through a semi-transparent reflector on her right (this is a handy trick if you happen to find yourself without a softbox but with an assistant who can hold the flash and reflector). Here’s the image before any compositing:

As you can see, this version looks quite a bit different from the finished composite. While editing photos from a shoot, I have the tendency to ask myself: would this work as a composite? Or, would adding some other elements make this a more interesting picture?

For this picture, the answer was clear (in my mind) right away. I needed a bear.

When you have an idea for an image and need a specific picture to make it work, there are several options. If you have a budget, you can search on traditional stock photo sites (such as iStockPhoto or Dreamstime); if not, you can check out some royalty-free options (such as Unsplash or Pexels). Since this was a personal project and my budget was precisely 0€, I skipped the paid options. And since I had a very specific image in mind (a bear standing on its hind legs photographed from the side), I couldn’t find an appropriate image in the limited catalogues of the royalty-free galleries. In this case, I delved into the third choice: Google image search. After a few tries, searching for “grizzly bear hind legs” came up with some promising choices (the highlighted photo was the one chosen).

Now, it wouldn’t be good to use a photo found from Google without permission (even if it is for a personal project). Thankfully, the photo I found had a watermark, which I used to track down the photographer, Kirsten Phillips, through a combination of Google and Facebook sleuthing. She responded through a Facebook message and was kind enough to send me the full-resolution file in exchange for giving her credit when the photo was published. Here is the full-resolution photo Kirsten sent me:

Now, the bear’s posture was perfect for the picture, but the lighting and colors didn’t quite match. Nothing a bit of Photoshop can’t fix. First, I flipped the bear horizontally, then used a layer mask to get rid of the background and cleaned up the grass strands on the bear’s legs. I also changed the angle of the bear’s head so that it would be looking down at a bit more of an angle. Here is the bear added to the original image:

I still had to get rid of my handy assistants and match the bear to the background. Instead of attempting to clone them away, I copied the area to the left of the model, mirrored it, and placed it behind the bear. After a bit of touch up, the image looked like this:

The only thing left was to color- and light-match the bear. After numerous adjustment layers (mainly curves and solid color overlays), I had a finished image:

Overall, the process took several (aka way too many) hours. But I’m happy with how the final, out-of-the-ordinary image turned out. In case you want a bit more of a taste, here is a short time-lapse style video showing all the different layers involved:

Model: Ruut Uusitalo.

The post Bringing a Fairy Tale to Life: Creating a Convincing Composite Image appeared first on Helsinki Portrait and Advertising Photographer.

The idea behind the shoot was to showcase the new Lexus NX in a variety of beautiful Finnish landscapes. My goal was to give the images a sense of adventure and movement. After doing the requisite location scouting prior to the shoot, I picked up the keys to the Lexus NX and had 24 hours to make it happen.

The locations varied from run-of-the-mill to somewhat haphazard. Here’s a behind-the-scenes shot from one of the trickier spots we shot in:

Trying to stay dry during yesterday’s shoot. : @roopekatajalaakso . . @Lexus_finland #carphotography #lexus #nx300 #lauttasaari #carswithoutlimits #nvkviikonkuva

A photo posted by Aaro Keipi (@aarokeipi) on Jul 12, 2016 at 3:27pm PDT

Driving the NX onto the pier was super sketchy. Since the pier was about 4 inches wider than the width of the SUV, the Lexus was less than a tire’s width away from becoming a rusty write-off. Thankfully, though, no Lexus representatives were around to stop us from attempting this, and after a few sweaty minutes, it was mission accomplished…well, at least until we had to back it out.

And here is the unedited image taken from the ladder:

Pretty different eh? Since my original idea for this shot involved a foggy, peaceful lake scene and the conditions did not play along, I had to turn to my friend Photoshop.

The image of the car on the wooded road was much less adrenaline-pumping to set up, but required another type of challenge: we lit different parts of the car individually with the goal of compositing them later in Photoshop. The idea behind this type of light painting is to accentuate certain curves or details, giving the final image a slightly enhanced-reality feel. Here’s one of the light-painting shots:

And the final image again:

One goal in all the images was to have the car look like it belongs with the background while still being the focus of each image. Here’s the picture in the field, before and after:

For the other picture by the seaside, the city behind the car added a bit too much noise to the final image. Here it is before:

And after a ton of masking and brushing:

Hope you enjoyed this! If you have any questions about the process or details, please leave a comment.

The post Behind the Scenes: Shooting the Lexus NX for Lexus Finland appeared first on Helsinki Portrait and Advertising Photographer.

One morning last December, I woke up and noticed that a dream of mine came true: I had taken a picture that went viral. A picture I took at a friend’s wedding had been shared by UNILAD on Facebook with the caption “Best wedding photo ever.” It had over 300,000 likes and was gaining hundreds by the minute. Unfortunately, they also added an instagram-worthy filter to it, but I figured I shouldn’t complain–the exposure was worth it (by the way, you can check out my weddings-focused website here: www.aarography.com).

The photo, minus the instagram-worthy filter

First, a little backstory: The bride in the picture was an old friend of mine, and when she contacted me about shooting her wedding, she mentioned having a couple of swords that she wanted to use in some of the pictures. The wedding took place in Luray, Virginia, a place not really known for its medieval castles (I’m based in Finland but travel to the U.S. a few times a year for weddings). The wedding was fantastic, and we got this fun shot of the bridal party “fighting” the wedding couple. As a surprise to the couple, I added a royalty-free castle and dark sky into the background of one picture with the help of Photoshop. The edit was done quickly (in less than an hour) and I didn’t pay much attention to details, treating it as a bonus to the wedding couple, and they loved it. The video below shows a breakdown of the layers used in the editing process

 A few days after delivering the picture to the happy couple, I posted it on imgur.com since I figured it might give some people a chuckle. A few hours later, my heart jumped to my throat when I found out that the picture had over 100,000 views and was going viral. So it began. The next few days were a blur as I constantly checked out which corners of the internet my picture had reached. This was the start of a wild ride, and now I’m going to share a few lessons I learned from the experience.

Lesson 1: Once an image is online, you can’t control where–or how–it spreads

The next couple days were a whirlwind of tracking where the picture spread…I watched as it reached 9gag, The Chive, a bunch of random Russian sites, and, of course, being filterized and shared by UNILAD on Facebook, a page with 14 million fans.

A google image search of the picture reveals dozens of hits

This was all exciting, but one thing was missing from all of these shares: a photo credit. I had taken a picture that was being viewed by millions of people–but it was doing me no good. “Typical,” I thought, “These are the kinds of things you read about on Petapixel.” But, then I sent UNILAD (the page with the most views by far) a message through Facebook–and to my surprise, they added a link to my Facebook page within minutes. Props to them for that, though shame for not crediting me in the first place.

Lesson 2: The Facebook likes start rolling in, but all is not well

As soon as UNILAD added the credit, my Facebook page started getting new likes. This was very exciting, as my page had been stuck around 600 likes for a few months (and, as we all know, more likes is always better…or so I thought). I soon realized, however, that my new fans were from all over the world, with a surprisingly high concentration in middle eastern and western Asian countries (Egypt, India, Bangladesh, etc.). These were people who were not likely to bring me any business, and judging by their profiles, the majority of these people were being paid to like pages on Facebook. So I did the unthinkable and started deleting fans from my page, reducing my overall number of likes and blocking most of the questionable countries in the process. I did this to make sure the interaction on my page stayed significant, as explained in articles like this one. This culling left me with just a few hundred new likes that I judged to be legitimate.

Facebook page fan insights for Aarography, after cleaning up suspected “paid” likes

Lesson 3: You have to leverage virality

A week after the image was posted, I had a ton of reputation on imgur, a couple hundred legitimate new likes on my Facebook page, a few vague requests for gigs, but nothing really solid to show for it. After a bit of brainstorming, I decided to contact media outlets in Helsinki to attempt to gain local visibility that would hopefully translate into sales. I got in touch with three Finnish entertainment/news websites, gave them a brief summary of the story and hoped they would run with it.

Screengrabs of articles in Finnish media

And run with it they did. Within two days, all three (plus one more) had written stories about the picture, and the stories were shared close to 10,000 times on Facebook. Best of all: all the media outlets credited me, many had a link to my website, and some even included an interview. All of this helped drive people to both my website and my Facebook page, resulting in an over 30x daily increase in visitors to my website (peaking at 1,400).

Lesson 4: Virality may not translate directly into sales–at least not without some work

All that being done, the effect wore off pretty quickly, as seen in the screenshot below.So it’s true–the Internet is a fickle mistress. Surprisingly, in spite of all these new visitors, the number of inquiries coming in didn’t increase significantly. So I determined that either the system was broken, or there must be something more I can do.

The Aarography at a bridal show in Helsinki (bridal shows here are a bit more relaxed compared to those in the U.S.). Notice the print on the left and the screen featuring a video of the picture’s editing process.

So to combat my lack of significant inquiries, two months after all of this happened I entered my first bridal show, armed with a decently-sized print of the picture in question. Thankfully, I received a lot of attention at the show–it seems half the people in Finland had seen the picture (though this is not necessarily a difficult thing to accomplish in a country with 6 million people)–and I ended up booking a few big weddings as a result.

Conclusion

The whole process was an emotional rollercoaster, with ups and downs as I tracked how far the picture spread (mostly without credit) across the world. All in all, the photo ended up on dozens of sites worldwide, racking over 350,000 views on imgur, 396,000 likes and 17,000 shares on Facebook, and over 10,000 shares on articles about the photo in Finland. Eventually, I also scored about 900 new legitimate Facebook likes on my page, with the majority coming from my geographic target market.

In spite of these ridiculous numbers, though, the long-term benefits of this viral picture remain to be seen. In my photography business, I have tried to live by the two-fold advice I remember reading a long time ago on Chase Jarvis‘ blog: take better pictures and show them to more people. A viral image takes care of the second half, but–as I found out–it may not be the big break you would expect. It seems there’s just no substitute for consistent, hard work. Now I’m back to trying to take better pictures and figuring out how to get more of the right people to look at them.

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