Mike, it was all done digitally. I wish I could say I did this in the darkroom back in 1998, but it was all done last week in 2014.
I started with two pictures of Will at the globe. This is what the originals looked like:
and
In one of the faked images (the right side), the globe is where it was in the original picture, but with the I-beam removed. In the other (left) I dropped the globe somewhat.
I had to do some resizing but the most time-consuming thing was "selecting" the globe, pasting it into another image, turning that image a few degrees to get his arm more or less attached to his shoulder again, and then pasting it back to the picture. Then I had to clone in sky around it. If you look closely, the worst artefacts of the process are in the sky where I took less time than I could have. Cloning in the road and grass were quite easy by comparison. All my cloning edges were really sharp, no matter how small a cloning brush I used, so I went over all the stitches with a "softening brush.
You can see, in the originals, an eye at the top of the globe for a hook to lift the buoy into place. I accidentally erased that in the first one, so I then had to take it out of the second one.
It's fairly simple-minded but it is tedious.
It took me about an hour to do the pair of pictures that I posted.
I haven't shown Will yet, but I think he'll be amused.
Philip
