Photography is a lot of hurrying up and waiting. You get ready, get to the location early, and wait. There are a lot of variables that goes into a "good" picture.
Looking at the picture above, you might think that it's a fairly simple picture. Just raise the camera, hit the shutter, and call it a day. This picture actually took WEEKS to make.
I've been attracted to this building for some time now. I liked the symmetry of the building and the flagpole in front of it. I've been doing a lot of walking just for the hell of it and this has been on my route for a few weeks.
The first approach was the obvious one, just go to the location and take the picture. There are a lot of problems with this approach. First, I live in Washington so weather is always a thought. The weather has been fairly good for the last few weeks so all I really needed to wait for was a day with nice beautiful clouds and a good enough breeze to blow the flag. These two things were critical in my opinion.
The next aspect was to get an interesting foreground. I was looking for either interesting people or a nice car. The problem here is that this is Lakewood, so there aren't too many exotic cars around. This is also not a very busy street so it took some time between seeing people walk across the scene. All of this meant that there was a lot of waiting around.
As you can see, the final picture was actually composed up of three seperate pictures. Each of the three photos was actually a part of a series that consisted of 10+ photos. In the original concept, I only planned on having one foreground subject but with a little bit of foresight, I was able to come up with the final image. Once I took the photo of the man looking back, I knew that I needed something else for the man to look at. Once I had the foreground, all I needed was the perfect waving flag.
When I had all the elements, it was just a matter of putting the composition together. This isn't a photoshop tutorial so let's just say that there was a lot of layer masking to get all the elements in place.
In the end, we have a picture that, although looks simple, tells more of a story as a whole than any of its one part.
This is not a technique that should be abused unless you want to specialize in this type of photography. You don't want to rely on this technique to the point that it becomes a crutch because "you can always use photoshop". It's always better to get it in camera with one shot because it can save you a lot of time and effort, but when that is not really possible, composite the image.
This is an extremely useful skill to know so I would recommend trying it for yourself! Go out, take pictures, and have fun.
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