Saturday, February 28, 2015

Creating A Stand Out PR Image

Funny elephant photo of a young boy riding his bicycle down the back of a delighted elephant!
This humorous photo of a young boy riding his bicycle down an elephant's back was created to fulfill the need for a PR image for a bicycle company that would stand out from the crowd. I think we succeeded!

Just put together this image for a friend, Jeff Cleary, who has started a new bicycle company “Cleary Bikes” creating adult style bicycles for kids. He wanted an image of a youngster riding on one of his bicycles to use for multiple PR purposes, but he wanted the image to be something that was out of the ordinary and that would grab people’s attention.

Jeff is familiar with my work with funny animals and suggested that we could have a kid riding his bicycle down an elephant’s back. Hmmm…that would certainly be different! 

We had a model, a young boy who was about as cute as they come (and at first impression painfully shy) come in to my studio for the shoot. Jeff helped steady him as he balanced on the bike with it’s rear wheel up on an apple crate to approximate the correct body position. The little boy was awesome. We told him to look really excited…and he got into it immediately with a huge open-mouthed grin that was perfect.  After the first six frames or so I checked the images and realized I had inadvertently opened up the f stop and was pretty badly overexposing…so we did it again and our model continued to give us that wonderful expression.

With the photography part of the job completed I turned to the imaging. I selected an elephant from a shoot I did years ago in Thailand and combined four captures to piece together the big pachyderm into a funny pose appropriate for a kid riding a bike down it’s back.  Next I pieced together a background. The immediate foreground was from a scene I photographed in Yemen, and the distant mountains and sky from Black Rock Desert (think Burning man). I then added appropriate shadows to “ground” the elephant into the scene.


I used the pen tool to create a clipping path around the model riding the bike, made the selection, and copied and pasted it into the elephant image. A little bit of adjustment for size, angle and position (and the hardest part...removing logos from the shoes!) and (Voila!) a truly unique bicycling image!

Of course, as part of the deal I have stock photo rights, and after removing the remaining logos I submitted the image to Blend Images as a Rights Managed stock photo. 

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