Mike and Brandon (I see Brandond added a more detailed instructions), fellow photo bloggers, have been using a photography technique called composite photography (I’ve also seen the term Photomontage). Basically, it’s where there’s bits and pieces of multiple images merged into a single image. As you can see, it can create a fun image!

How I did this. 10 images, 2 happy young ladies, 1 tripod and 1 wireless trigger (just made life easier for me).
About the shots. Lucky me, my camera takes something like 8 frames a second although, I believe in this shot it was more like 6 (sure it has to do with the quality of image setting). Lucky for me, Kateryna actually paused for just a second when she landed allowing my camera to “catch up” and start taking more images! After Kateryna jumped, I had Cait go sit on the bench and we took several shots of her cheering on. 😀
About post processing. Using CS5, I loaded all 10 images via Camera Raw (I always shoot in RAW) and used the “previous conversion” just in case there were minor changes. I actually started backwards on the merge as I knew I wanted to bring in the jump images with the previous image being “behind” the last image.

1. I moved the previous image into the last image, aligned the images (super easy since I was using a tripod), made sure I was working on the layer for which I just moved the image into
2. Threw a mask on it and selected the paint brush. A quick little something about masks. When you first place the mask, the background of the mask should be white. White, on a mask, will show the effect and black will hide the effect.
3. I made sure the colour of the paint brush was black and then proceeded to paint out the part which I wanted to be shown into the final image. I know, confusing right? Read on, it’ll make sense in a second.
4. After I got most of what I wanted painted out, I then inverted the mask (make sure your mask is clicked and press CTRL + I on a PC) which made all the whites black and….ready…all the blacks white! By inverting the mask, I just made the portions where I “hid” by painting in black visible as the black paint is now white! So why did I start out hiding what I wanted to show? Simple really, it’s much easier (for me) to paint out what I can see than to paint in something I can’t (remember the white reveals black hides bit). Pretty tricky eh?
5. Now having the mask inverted, I changed the colour of the paint brush to white and touched up along the edges.
6. After doing this 9 different times, I went into each layer and changed the opacity of each layer progressively dropping it by 5% to give the “ghosting” or see through look.

Whew…glad that’s over? 😛 The hardest part of this image for me was not painting over the areas where the working layer overlapped the previous layer. It’s early here, hope I got all of it right as I was going off memory. 😀  Enjoy…

…d

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