The famous Battle of Iwo Jima Memorial statue inspired this crazy concept. The idea was to create a jeans advertisement inspired by the pose that the soldiers were in, and to mix it in with a sexy twist without being disrespectful to the war veterans. It was a great shoot working with so many models and I have to say it was a lot of work pulling the final thing together.

Postproduction took more time than the shoot itself (nearly 3-4 hours per poster)… I was aiming to do a HDR (High Dynamic Range) postproduction to create that animated feel to it. All of the accessories like the ammunition chains, dog tags, grenades etc were photoshopped into the scene. The shot was a composition of the group against a white backdrop and then the environment was added in later. I shot each model individually so that I had a variety of poses to choose from and then I chose the best shots and chopped in the models into the shot. The hardest part about this sort of work where you are pretty much creating everything from scratch is the maintain photorealism and also make it believable. ie. making sure light sources and shadows are consistent etc…

Seeing the behind the scenes shots you can see how much work (and fun) went into this shoot! Let me know what you think!