The Making of: The Macaw Experience

In my job as a Bird Handler and Photographer with Digiphoto, I get to play with birds all day. So I had the idea to make an ad for the Macaw Experience. The whole process essentially took three steps. I took photos of the birds, edited and arranged the photos in Photoshop, and then went back to take some photos of the various surroundings of one of the bird locations.

                On my day off, I went to take photos of my coworkers (i.e. the birds). I took photos each bird in different areas but decided to put them on a nearby bench one at a time. This gave me the best shots. It also helped afterward during editing since I would have had to cut out the perch from their feet or other various body parts. I used the same exposure for each bird so the photos would all match. I took mostly body shots in a side profile and decided to use those for the final pics.

                After I had all my photos picked out, I cut out the birds from their backgrounds. Then I moved them around the border of a black background in different ways to figure out which way looked the best. I had started out with a vertical layout but it wasn’t working so I chose the horizontal. Next, I added the words and logo to the middle and added drop shadows to the birds to make them pop. The black background wasn’t working so I went back to work and shot various scenes from the area and tried them all out on it. I chose the waterfall because we do shoots there and the colors really made the birds stand out. In total, I think the whole project took about hours to complete.