Boy Rides Dinosaur!

A woman asked me to do some portraits of her in her home, and after we wrapped up the shoot, she threw a little challenge at me.  She wondered if it was possible to do a composite shot of her son as if he were riding his toy dinosaur.  The finished composite shot is at the end of this blog.

Not one to back down from a creative challenge, I quickly put together the shoot with just a few components. First I had to shoot the dinosaur.  I lit it up with my studio lights as if it were daytime, then I had to shoot the dinosaur to give it the perspective of being large.  Here's the dinosaur:

I had the dinosaur slightly turned so I could really get the boy in the shot.  We grabbed an Indiana Jones fedora as a prop and then had him holding onto it as if it were ready to fly off in an action shot:

The kid did a pretty good job imagining that he was on a dinosaur.  I then had to find a proper setting for the dinosaur, and so found this cool Jurassic Park shot with the sign in it.  I thought that was pretty good, then found a picture of another dinosaur that I thought would look good if I added it to the shot.

Now you can't just throw all these elements in and expect it to look realistic.  I had to cut around the boy to make it appear he truly was on that dinosaur.  And then work on the lighting so all the images would match, and then throw in shadows on the background.  The first shot below is the final composite, and then after that is a cropped shot that focuses on the boy.