Track and Golf Posters

Yes, it's the start of a new sport season so I have been blogging about my newest posters.  Just finished up with the guys track and the golf posters.  To be honest I had no ideas of what I was going to do with the posters.  Yes, even I go blank occasionally.  But I know how to light and I know how to composite so I figured I would take their pictures first and then come up with a cool background.  The only thing is when I do it this way I can't get too crazy with the posing and have to remain somewhat generic.  But each team wanted at least 14 people on the poster and on the final product I also have to include a schedule and a list of sponsors, which makes it very difficult to come up with a cool background and include a large amount of team members. 

For the golf I came up with the idea of Daily Dose of Iron.  There is a steel mill in town that employs a large amount of people and I thought it would be cool to gain access to the mill and take some sweet pictures inside for the background.  But after a few phonecalls I found out that for some reason they are very relucant to let me in.  Instead I was able to tweak some other images to create what I needed.  But it ended up looking much like I think I would have been able to get inside the mill.

The guys track I was at a complete loss of what to do.  I spent forever looking for something that would inspire me.  I saw a burning tire somewhere and thought it was cool but decided to change the tire to a stopwatch, but I still wasn't sure what to do for a motto.  After a lot of attempts I came up with "It's go time and inserted a bunch of other clocks in the background.  I tried to stick to the blue and gold theme for the posters because those are the school colors.  I think it turned out pretty well for having no idea when I took the individual shots.

Fun New Track Team Composite!

So each time I have to create a new team composite one of the biggest challenges is coming up with cool new ideas.  The day before they came in I had no ideas what so ever.  I was completely blank and to be honest feeling a little of the winter blues.  I spent that evening randomly searching for some kind of inspiration.  Not only did I have the girls track team to create something for but also the guys track team and the golf team. 

About the 10,000 page of google images I came across an image of The Wizard of Oz with the yellow brick road and I knew I had found my inspiration for the girls track poster.  My next big step was coming up with elements to create the background.  I have a vast library of stock images I have shot from all of my travels and began going through them.  I was just recently out in Palm Springs with some other photographers and we had visited Joshua Tree National Park and I had some awesome mountain vistas that I knew I could use for the background. 

 

The foreground was a little tougher. I gathered tons of possible elements and began experimenting with different options, different colors and different lighting situations. I tried everything from Angry tree stumps to huge flowers and ended up not using many of them.  I also did a lot of studying of the newest Oz movie poster that was recently released while working on my poster. I didn't want to copy it but it's great to see how they use different elements to draw the viewers eye to certain areas and create interest.

 

It was a long process but I finally achieved the look I wanted with lots of different little elements and overlays to get the color saturation that I was looking for.

Notice the lane numbers I added into the yellow brick road!

Below are a few of the other elements that I used to create the scene

 

These backlit flowers were shot for a poster I created last year with a Hunger Games Theme

 

 

This flowering tree is in my front yard and was taken last year right before we did my daughter's 2 year pictures under it.

This was also taken last year during a camping trip.  This is the curved rock on the left side of the poster.  I simply erased parts of the rock to create the shape I wanted.