Before going forward, I should probably define what composite means for some of the newer folks reading this. A composite image when you combine visual elements from multiple sources into a single image.
There varying reasons for making a composite. One is for lighting purposes as there are times when the desired result cannot be achieved without shooting the elements of the final image seperately. Composites allow you to create something which does not exist or did not take actually place. Another can be for safety. To get a shot of an athlete making a diving catch, you are likely going to have to take the shot several times. You don't want an athlete risk getting injured in this process so having them dive onto something like a high jump pad allows you to repeat the same process without risk of injury until you get the right shot.
The goalkeeper was shot inside and landed on a high jump pad and was later inserted into the background image. Asking a goalkeeper make this save multiple times (or even once) for a photo shoot is never an option due to the risk of injury. The safety of the athlete comes before everything so if you cannot figure out how to do something with that as the priority, you cannot do the shoot.
Here are a few more composite images I've created for various promotional campaigns along with brief descriptions:
We've all seen the shot of a football player through the facemask of another player, but I wanted to create an image of a player seeing himself in a mirror just before taking the field. This is a result of three images with almost everything coming from one image. This was shot on a tripod with a timer just over the players right shoulder, so the second image was used only to replace parts of the background after the camera and tripod were removed in post. The third image is the facemask which we detached from the helmet. The facemask was shot IN FOCUS and then blurred out in post to simulate what it looks like from the perspective of the player. Shooting it already blurred out would have made it very difficult if not impossible to cut out.
This was a fun one as the student-athlete is presented walking from school to the training ground. It's actually three images: the person, the hallway, and the field. The person was shot on a green screen and cut out and the hallway is on the second floor with a window at the end, not a soccer field, which was added from a third image. The shadow and light rays/haze were added in Photoshop to complete the image.
It's certainly possible to shoot something similar to this without compositing but I choose to make this with a series of 8 images for a couple of reasons. By dropping the opacity of three of them, it removes some of the clutter and simulates movement. This has to be shot with a tripod and once you have the camera set, the tripod and focal length cannot move or change.
Hopefully that offers some insight on the how and why composites can be used. In the next piece, I'll break down the lighting and assembly for a recent promotional schedule I made for Lipscomb University.