A bunch of people wondered how I did my flying and falling pictures, so I threw together a rather crappy fast paced tutorial. It’s a really simple concept if you know your way around photoshop, and for those of you who don’t, you can at least see the before and afters which might make you understand a little better!

STEP ONE: First step is setting up your scene. Figure that out and set up your camera on a tripod. This is important, because you need the backgrounds to match identically. Now the next step is to set up your stool… it might seem backwards, but you need to make sure the subject you want is in focus. Focus on the stool, then throw your focus into manual so that all future photos have that same focus. Now take away the stool (make sure you mark the spot it was in). Take a photo of the landscape (left photo). Now you can start the gymnastics (right photo), set your stool back up and go at it. I did this all by myself with a remote timer, but if you have a partner to help you, even better!

STEP TWO: Open up your photos in photoshop. If you don’t have any background issues like I did (the barn and wires) then skip to step three. I happened to hate the barn and wires, thought they were too busy, so I decided to get rid of them. For this, duplicate the layer, flip the canvas horizontally, and then erase the side where the barn was in order to get this mirrored image. Now, this probably won’t work for most images. It worked famously for the dirt road, because if mirrored it just looks like itself, but most photos would probably look funny unless the image is symmetrical in the center.

STEP THREE: Paste in your subject photo. On the subject photo layer, start to erase the stool (and in my case the barn and wires again).

That’s it! Process the rest of the image to your liking. I ended up taking a shot of the umbrella and pasting it in in the end, just for some more drama. So simple, right?

For the flying picture I did the exact same thing. Only difference here is I used three photos. The last photo was only used to copy a leg from.