Okay, maybe not really. But my alter ego is! He’s taking off into the waning Barcelona sun on a pretty sweet ride.
So here’s the story with this one: I have hundreds of unused photos from my Barcelona trip earlier this year. Most of them just aren’t that good on their own. These two shots were no exception. I really liked them, but they just weren’t great. So they’ve been sitting in my collection for the last few months, nearly forgotten.
Fast-forward to yesterday and I’m browsing my old photos looking for cool backgrounds. I flag these two as potential candidates and then an idea hits me – what would they look like together? I let the idea stew for awhile until last night when I actually had some time to work on them.
The composite came together pretty well, though I had a tough time trying to figure out what to leave in focus and what to blur (should the motorcycle be in focus and the background not, the other way around, or a little of both???). And I had one glaring element that was severely lacking: my cycle didn’t have a rider.
Whoops.
Time to improvise! I set up some lights, jumped on my bike (the bicycle kind) and snapped a few shots (all the while feeling pretty ridiculous). It was a lot harder to get that riding-a-motorcycle-look on a bicycle without falling on my ass than I thought it would be. Luckily, I was able to get some decent shots, so I dumped one of the rider shots into the file and seasoned to taste. All in all, it turned out pretty cool and lets me finally show a few Barcelona pics that probably would’ve gone unused otherwise.
Below is a short animation (sorry for the crappy quality gif) showing a walk-through of the processing.
UPDATE! Here’s a better quality video version of the how-to video:
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