Winter Storms.....

This time not snow but storms of a rather more turbulent nature

Meet Stuart Robinson.

I photographed Stuart the other day for Channel 4 TV in the UK

He was the subject of a Cutting Edge Documentary 'A very British Storm Junkie' as he is an amateur storm chaser who travels the world

The challenge was to create a truly eye catching image, with the aid of photoshop, as twisters are rather thin on the ground in the London area.

I worked very closely with ace retoucher Charlie to create a cohesive and 'plausible' image

The only stipulation was no flying cows.......damn!

Charlie spent many a happy hour creating the 'background' storm from goodness knows how many images

The trick then was to position and light Stuart in a way that worked

This meant shooting him from a slightly higher angle...



Lighting him from the back with 2 Chimera strip lights, to mimic the backlight in the back ground, and a medium Chimera softbox from the front




Then to bring Stuart in, standing him on sheets of plastic so we did not destroy too much seamless, spot the mistake? We used black plastic at first which would have made cutting him out a bit of a mission, so we switched to white.



Here is Stuart getting into the swing of things



Leaning into the 'wind' direction of the model is all important

Now for the fun part......spraying him with water, now before anyone writes in the lights are battery powered so pretty darned safe, behind softboxes, and further away from the very gentle mist spray, to give a further authentic look



This is the shot we used in the end, and this is how it looked on the Channel 4 website