The Alligator Shot!

Since I published the shot of Beth stepping on alligator at Brazos Bend State Park, a lot of people have asked me exactly how that worked out: Was it a real alligator?  Did she really stand on it?  Here, you get to see for yourself exactly how I created this composite image.  Here's the final image:

If you look at this image, it looks as real as can be, that my brave newly Texan wife is strutting her stuff on an adult American Alligator.  She shows no fear here, and for good reason.

She's not actually standing on an alligator.  She's standing on a log.

Check below for the two images, side by side that I used in this composite:

If you notice, the alligator is a horizontal shot, and the shot of Beth is vertical.  This was intentional.  Now go back to the composite, and you notice that the alligator's tail stretches off the shot to the left, and his mouth cuts off the shot to the right, not so much as to be distracting.

By having the alligator stretch across the picture like that, it gives me a natural place to make a cut from one image to the other.  I cut exactly along the top of the alligator with the alligator layer on top of Beth's layer.  With a border like that, there's no need to mesh two different environments, and the shift from the environment below the alligator, with the water, seems very natural with the environment above the alligator, which comes from Beth's picture.  In fact, the log she is standing on helps, as it looks like it could be part of the lake.

Now if I had just cut the edge of the alligator and placed Beth's foot on him, it would not have looked natural at all.  So to give it more reality, I cut into the alligator's back so Beth's foot would appear to be more on top of the middle of the back.  The next thing that I did was take the area of the alligator's back directly beneath her shoe, and applied a subtle shadow to it.

Put it all together and you've got yourself a mad Texas woman stepping on a real live adult American Alligator.  Feel free to email me at ron@ronmckinneyphotography.com if you would like to try a composite like this.  Of course, you'll need a program like Photoshop that allows you to edit in layers.