Grant Thornton presented me with an interesting challenge. They wanted me to shoot several individuals standing in front of a group but separated by some distance so that the group would be blurred.
Normally this is not a problem if I can use a long lens and have lots of space to position the two elements with a sufficient gap. The lens will then focus on the foreground (individual) leaving the background (group) blurred.
However, for this shoot we had a boardroom with limited space. Not nearly enough to use a long lens (plus 3 lights, stands, brollies, softbox, 9ft background etc.) and certainly too small to be able to create a gap between the two.
The solution was solved digitally. Shooting the groups and the individuals separately meant that they could easily be joined together in any position by using Photoshop. The additional benefit is that each shot could then also be used as a separate shot or used to combine with other shots.
This technique works pretty well when I can shoot the subjects against a white background as the subjects have to be cut out from their backgrounds to allow them to be super-imposed on other images.
The tricky bit is getting it all to look natural and for the merger to be invisible.
This technique is great if you’ve got clients/subjects that can’t be present at the same place at the same time. With a careful lighting, camera angle and lens size, any images taken in different locations at different times can be merged successfully.
