Photographing People Inside Illustrations: A Campaign in Santo Domingo

A campaign shot in the Dominican Republic where every environment is a drawing - flat geometric rooms, an illustrated highway, a neon music den - with real people lit to sit convincingly inside them.

This is the most unusual set of images on this blog. Every environment in it is a drawing. The rooms have no corners in the normal sense, the highway has a sun the size of a building, and the music room is made of concentric magenta circles. The only photographic elements are the people and their furniture.

Work like this succeeds or fails entirely on one thing: whether the lighting on the person agrees with the lighting implied by the illustration.

Light to the drawing, not to the person

Normally you light a subject the way you want them to look. Here you light them the way the imaginary room would light them, which means the illustration has to exist first.

In the cycling frame the sun is enormous, low and behind the rider, so he is lit from behind with a hard rim and almost no frontal fill. In the yoga frame the drawn light source is high and warm, so the key is high and warm. In the neon music room the colour comes from two directions at once, so there are two coloured sources on him doing exactly that.

Get this wrong and no amount of masking saves the composite. The eye does not consciously notice light direction, but it notices instantly when something is wrong.

Ground the figure with contact

The second rule is that the person has to touch something. A family sits at a real table. A woman sits in a real red armchair. The cyclist is on a real bike, and the yoga mat is a real mat with real weight on it.

Contact shadow is what glues a photograph to a graphic. A figure floating a few pixels above an illustrated floor reads as a sticker. A figure with a soft dark shadow pooling under a chair leg reads as a person in a place, however impossible the place is.

“The eye does not consciously read light direction. It notices immediately when it is wrong.”

Casting for stillness

One more thing this style demands: calm performances. The environments are already loud - saturated, patterned, busy with drawn icons. If the people are also big and animated the frame has nothing to rest on.

So everybody here is doing something quite ordinary and quite still. Sitting at a table. Holding a pose. Riding at a steady speed. The set does the shouting and the person does the anchoring, which is the reverse of how I would normally balance a lifestyle frame.

It sits alongside the other heavily art-directed colour work I have done - the two-colour Bancolombia sets and the gel-lit rooms of the Bimbo campaign.