This Was the Best Photo?

I can’t be the only person who constantly finds themselves in this position: I’m working on something that I want people to see, but the photos I want to use are crap. I’m always saying things like “this would look better if this person was smiling” or “this picture is exactly what I need, but there’s motion blur”. Sifting through albums should’ve been in the job description. Too often I have to scrap an otherwise perfect photo because a single thing was off, forcing me to settle on one of the other hundreds of different photos I have.

But sometimes, I don’t have other photos.

One of our clients who was running for Sheriff asked if we could get him a pro 2nd Amendment graphic he could put on a billboard. Before we could get started, he informed us of a problem with the photo he wanted us to use.

The Problem? If you guessed that the barrel of his gun is cropped out of the photo at the tip, you’re half correct. He also forgot to put his rifle’s sights up. An honest mistake, since he didn’t intend to actually shoot it. It’s reasonable to assume he glossed over it while focusing on looking presentable. Still, if there’s a chance it could be used by his opponents or a bloodthirsty media that heavily scrutinize law enforcement to smear him as incompetent or reckless, its a chance he’d rather not take. Because we had no other photos to use, and nobody’s schedule lined up for a reshoot (and not worth it the time and money), this was the best photo we could use. My work had been cut out for me.

The first thing I did was locate the parts of his gun that were needed. Since it’s an AR-15, I looked for a picture of one at a similar angle, and used the best one I could find. Same with the sight once I figure out the one used in the original photo. It wasn’t until I removed the backgrounds on the photos that I realized the amount of work I would need to put in to this make it look real. This was another one of those times where the perfect picture simply didn’t exist.

The rail pretty much gives away the sight’s exact angular position in three dimensions. This means if I didn’t find another picture of a guy holding that gun at that exact angle, taken at the same time of day, under the same weather conditions and lighting, who also happens to be running for sheriff, then I’d need to get creative. I don’t know how to 3D model, I don’t know anyone I can speak to who owns that sight, and anything I draw or make in Illustrator would be hard to pass off as real. I knew I’d eventually have to use Photoshop, but only after running out of ideas to do this in the easiest way possible, because there are no workarounds.

I eventually came up with the idea to take it apart and rearrange the pieces until I had something decent. It seemed simple enough, but figuring out where to segment the original photo in the first place was a challenge on its own. Despite being a small part of a photo meant to be seen from the highway, it still needed to be recolored, shaded, and matched to the background photo’s resolution to not be as obvious. In my opinion, I think it turned out alright, but let it be known that something as simple as flipping your gun’s sights up will take more than 3 hours to do in post. I still wasn’t halfway done.

With that taken care of, I began adding muzzle to the end of his gun’s barrel, which turned out simple enough. There’s not much you can do about rotating a cylinder shape like that (at least not with my methods), so I was fortunate by how well it turned out. Patching up the background wasn’t too hard, it was just tedious and took a while.

After about 7 hours, I finally had something the client would be happy with, and a transparency and background I have since reused in later projects. The first of which being the billboard that was originally commissioned. The piece from start to finish took around 45 minutes, since many elements were reused to match the campaign’s aesthetic.

In total, I’d estimate the entire project took between 7.5 and 9 hours. Even for the cheapest graphic designer you can find, it’s a heavy price to pay for something so seemingly insignificant. Don’t let this happen to you. Always take multiple photos before switching angles, or else some graphic designer is gonna rack up hours executing some whackass plan that’ll probably disappoint (I got lucky).

Please do not attempt to contact anyone featured in my graphics.