Top Tips consistent composites

For a natural-looking composite the lighting, camera angles and posing need to match across both scenes

01 choose a camera height

When setting up your camera, choose a camera height that you can match across both the miniature scene and the full-size portrait. Here we’ve kept it roughly at chest height in both shots, but you could try varying it by shooting from a very high or low angle instead. When composing, Live View is a big help.

02 Perfect The Pose

Choose a pose that will be easy for your subject to mimic in the full-size portrait. Here we’ve opted for a sitting pose with one leg up, so that the shadows fall across the page of the book our little man is using as a seat. Once posed, we can tweak the lighting position to control the look of the shadows.

03 control The light

The smaller a light source is, the harder the shadows. It’s worth keeping this in mind when matching the lighting between the two scenes, especially as the size of the light will change in relation to the size of the subject. Here the shadows from the lamp are hardedged because the source is fairly small.

04 shoot The empty scene

After capturing a shot of the doll, it’s crucial to take the figure out and then fire off another frame – making sure that the exposure settings, camera position and lighting all stay exactly the same. This way, if there’s any messy overlap in our composite, we can use the empty details to replace the doll.