Preparing for this personal project took a significant amount of time: scouting for the right location and people, (a lot of) research and ordering the right props. Given that my google searches included terms such as "nuclear war", "nuclear waste", "fallout", "gas mask" "apocalypse" and that I ended up buying 3 Hazmat suits off of ebay, I would jokingly tell my wife that we'd be getting a visit from the FBI (thankfully we didn't!).
One of my main objectives for the final image was to bring dimension to the overall scene. To accommodate for this I photographed with a fisheye lense. During retouching/compositing I focused on bringing in multiple elements into various areas of the photo to give it depth. Images were placed in foreground, background, middle and the top of the frame.
I used a total of 23 photos and a lot of light painting for the finished composite.
