The folks at Stillwater Creative Group had a theme of "Looking Ahead" to illustrate for a large trade show graphic for Littelfuse, an automotive accessories supplier. To show this, Nancy and Bill Creighton at Stillwater designed an image with a woman looking into the distance, the road visible in her mirrored sunglasses.
As much fun as it would have been to go to the high desert country and shoot this on location, it was more practical to shoot the model in studio and digitally create and assemble the rest of the graphic. Ford Model Sille Sillaste was selected from a large group of talent and we shot her in studio one morning. We wanted the client to make decisions based only on the portion of her expression that would actually be seen in the final photo, so the actual eyewear was painted silver to help render the final tones and to eliminate seeing Sille's eyes. Of course, this pretty much blindfolded our model, who had to deduce from our complicated directions just what we needed from her. Lighting simulated midday sun, and Nancy provided the wind in the model's hair by waving a large card very rapidly for a....long.....time. (Thanks, Nancy--nice work!) Within an hour we had plenty of usable shots, and we wrapped the first part of the project right on schedule.
Once the folks at Littlefuse had selected the best expression, we set about creating the sky background, the sunglass reflection and redesigning the sunglasses themselves. This was all done digitally, with low res versions emailed back and forth over a period of days until everyone was satisfied with the result. The final image was compiled from two images from our model shoot, (one for the face, another for the hair), a stock sky shot, a desert road stock shot, and hand rendering of the sunglass frames.
For output to the large printed graphic, the final file was written as a 1.35 Gigabyte CMYK Tiff file.
More Samples