In 2009, I set out to create some images that were more photo-art than traditional photography. After spending years striving to capture reality in the most exciting and true-to-source ways, I decided to break out into the world of "photo-art" as many traditional photographers call it. My first step into this realm of artistic endeavor was to create an image that I had in mind for years. In the 90's, I fell in love with the Tomb Raider games and always wanted to create an image like you see here.

About the same time I found Tomb Raider, I also came across this great location with a catacomb right in southern Arizona. I was out exploring ghost towns and found this incredible location that I filed away in the "must shoot" category. I only returned in 2009 when I was planning out this shoot.

Marbella is a dancer and we wanted to do something athletic, fun, and sexy. She was the perfect Lara Croft for me, so we decided to come out to this ghost town in the middle of the desert and spent a few hours in 110 degree heat. Marbz rocked the shoot and launched my foray into Heroic images!

I revisited this image in 2010 to update the look. I used a process more like my current images, and gave this image some new life.

For such a complex looking image, the lighting was dead simple. I used a 30" OctaBox just to camera left, above the level of her gun so that it would cause that long highlight running down her arm with nice, smooth shadows underneat. That was the extent of the lighting setup. Sometimes simple is perfect, and I think that any more lighting would have really hurt the video-game feel of this image. Here's a lighting diagram:

The post processign was quite simple, I performed my grunge effect to increase contrast in the walls and ground, then added some exposure to sculpt the highlights and removed some to smooth and deepen the shadow transitions. I won't do a video specifically on this image, but the techniques are similar to what I show in these two articles: Create your own Heroes, and Glam to Grunge.

Hit me up in the comments if you have any questions or would like me to do a start-to-end tutorial!