Knights returning from the Crusades

This was one of the first composite images I did when I bought Photoshop 2.0 in the early 90's. I'd always wanted to create a picture of two knights in a foggy forest coming back, presumably, from the Crusades. I had the vision in my mind, but to set something like that up would take an enormous amount of time, energy, and money. So, one summer I went to a Renaissance Faire and photographed a jousting exhibition with armored knights on armored horses. In this particular shot, two knights were taking a break between events. In back of them sat the audience in bleachers cordoned off by ropes. Using the pen tool and working at 400%, I carefully selected the two men and pasted them into a forest I'd photographed at dawn about an hour south of Venice, Italy. I could have eliminated the blue color, but I kept it. It added mood. I then used the dodge tool to add would-be fog at the bottom of the frame. It's very hard to make a realistic juncture between the hooves of the horses and the ground, so I camouflaged that with the fog. In the original photo of the knights, the knight on our right was a holding a broken wooden lance from the jousting competition. I bought a medieval sword on eBay and replaced the lance with the sword, again using the pen tool to select the weapon. The pen tool is the most precise method of making a selection in most cases.