Anatomy of a shot: Alien Abduction

I recently put together a fun shoot with some family. We went out to the desert and took some photos of us being abducted by aliens. It was pretty fun, and I thought it might be fun to break down how I did it.

First, here's an overview:

That pretty much sums it up. But as you can see, it was a pretty fun setup. i did discover that i needed at least two shots to make the foreground and background come out in one seamless photograph. So I had to do one with a model, +Sean Clark , frozen in air. And another exposed so that I could get the faint mountains in the background. As far as the initial lighting setup was concerned, it was pretty straightforward. lots of duct tape, improvisation, and the right tools. the flash itself had to be modified a bit as well:

As you can see, this is all pretty advanced stuff. (Har Har). Just some good ol' tape and tin foil. I did a lot of experimenting to find the correct shape for the pool of light. And then came the actual image production in Photoshop:

Looks easy, takes FOREVER. I wanted to give Sean a bit more height so I had to cut him out and place him where I wanted him. Then I had to make sure the images fit together. So there was just a little tinkering with the lighting on each layer. In the end a pretty fun image was produced:

Hope you enjoyed!