I’m a longtime fan of Adrian Sommeling’s photography with his son. He has a neat hyper-reality style achieved by combining studio shots (I presume greenscreen-type stuff) with dramatic and often dangerous looking backdrops. Needless to say, I’ve wanted to try my own take on it since I first saw them.

Yesterday afternoon, I brought the camera outside to take a few snaps while my boy ran around in the snow. Realized a few minutes in that the time was right to give it a shot.

I started with a few snaps of the snow’s surface from very close to the ground, trying to approximate the angle at which I’d be taking pictures of him. Then, I took about 50 of him doing various things, keeping in mind the shadow lines of the backdrop photos to minimize time in the editing room.

Below is the composite I came up with. The shadow was borrowed from another object that I scrubbed out of the scene.