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