Verdant: botanical photo-compositing for FESPA Printeriors.
Verdant started out life as a three metre ‘green wall’ made up of many separate photographs and used in FESPA’s Printeriors area at their European trade fair. (see FESPA Printeriors project for other works).
Because the file was so huge, and to make it involved a great many layers, it was created in three sections. After its use in Printeriors I decided to separate these three, and give them natural feeling black borders so they would appear to be separate floating green walls. I now sell them as fine art photographic prints.
Creating Verdant was technically challenging; each different plant specimen is photographed by myself in the wild using a makeshift outdoor ‘studio’ involving black fabric placed behind foliage to isolate single plants or small naturally occurring compositions. The black fabric aids in cutting out the foliage in post production. These were shot with a soft flash to overpower any ambient light so that they could all be composited together with consistent directional lighting.
Once shot each specimen was painstakingly selected and masked out from its background and added to the overall composition to slowly build the final images. Shadows were added and the finally the leaves were retouched/repaired where needed. Whilst they look, to some extent, like natural scenes, they are in fact highly curated composites
