Traveling Through Digital Waters

• Lens selection: The type of lens used to capture the background should be the same used to capture the subject.

• Angle and quality of light: The subject should be lit to match the conditions of the background. Shadows, Balint says, can provide a lot of useful information.

• Position of the camera: “That’s a little harder to nail right on,” Balint cautions. “We assume that most of these backgrounds were [photographed] hand-held; that a normal-height person stood holding a camera and clicked. We’ve tried to keep that consistent, and we’ve created a fixed distance to our models.”