This is something totally new and different for me – composite photography to create an entirely new scene that didn’t actually exist anywhere but inside my head. The trick with composite photography is to create an image that is believable and doesn’t look like the subject is cut out and pasted onto a new background.
In this image, the palomino horse is a photograph that I took quite a few years ago, with some additional painted mane and tail. The background is created with two separate images of a forest for the background and a second image of a field of flowers for the foreground, both of which were free backgrounds from Pixabay. I also used a number of textures in different layer modes to blend everything together. It was quite a challenge to make it look realistic as the light source on my horse was totally different to both background images. I’m sure there is an easier way to adjust light source in Photoshop, but I don’t know how to do it so this did actually require a bit of digital painting to blend the background images together and to create the misty haze that gives the image an ethereal but realistic feel to it.
