George Clarke of Perfect Clean needed a simple, compelling image to convey the idea of a worldwide market for his microfiber cleaning products. His suggestion of hands cradling the globe in one of the company's cleaning towels was just the direct and graphic kind of idea we needed.
The first stop, obviously, was NASA. Some investigation yielded an image shot from Apollo 15 which had the right mix of continents and clouds. After obtaining a hi-res scan, the globe itself was rounded out to eliminate the slight dark nightside crescent, and continents were greened up a bit and given fleecier white clouds.
Then it was time to shoot the towel. A round glass light fixture stood in for the planet so that the towel would have something spherical to cradle and a realistic shadow would be cast. George volunteered to be the hands, not realizing he would be stuck motionless for a good part of the morning as we adjusted the towel for best draping and fabric texture. Luckily, his hands were also cradled in a large bag of dried kidney beans for support. We shot the image on 4 x 5 color transparencies.
Now all that was left to do was assemble the two images, along with a more current product label, into this final image. It serves as the company's new brochure cover and a large trade show graphic banner.