Back in June I drove down to West Virginia with my assistant Seth to shoot portraits of two different subjects who have recovered from opiod addiction for the state Department of Health and Human Resources. I was working alongside a video crew (who was shooting a tv-spot) and under the direction of the agency Fahlgren Mortine to create multiple exposures showing the subject’s new life without chemical dependency as part of the Back to Life campaign.

The first day was shooting a number of scenarios on location with the subjects families to be used as the inlaid image in the composite. Historically I’ve created all of my multiple exposure images in-camera, for the sake of time I decided to shoot the frames separately and composite later. That said, since my Canon 5DIV makes multiple exposures incredibly easy by overlaying frames in live view I was able to take a portrait of the subject on a white sweep and overlay it as I framed up my environmental portraits to ensure I had enough space in my shadow and highlight areas to easily composite the images later on.

Having shot all the location scenarios on day one, the second day was all in studio. As I lit and posed the subjects I made sure to leave enough shadow area on them to inlay the location image, which is also why they’re wearing black shirts. I lit them with a closely-positioned softbox to the right of them in order to create soft light with a fast fall-off and deep shadows.

When it came time to make the composite we ultimately decided to extend the location image over the white background as well as the shadow area on the subject in order to see more of the environment. These images will run on billboards, in print, and online. A big thanks to Seth, Bill, and everyone else at Fahlgren for making this happen.