Greetings,
As a Photographer, I can give you my opinion of how it was done… Or at least my diagnosis, based on how I would have accomplished it…
the bike is much closer to vertical for the original photograph, and yes, I can with relative certatinty say it is a photo… by it’s appearance, and luminance, and other intangible qualities, that are hard to describe, for the same reason that I can tell when something is shot on TV in video, or film, I can usually tell which one was shot on film…
The bike was much closer to normal verticality, the rider leaned over to ‘look’ like he was doing so on the ‘track’. it is obviously shot outside, given the specularity of sone reflections, and the sharp shadows, and the shadows are filled masterfully with reflectors and other lighting control devices, possibly including strobe lighting.
The Lens was probably even a normal-ish focal length, maybe a short-ish telephoto, but certainly not a very long telephoto like a 600mm.
The rest is easy, just rotate the image, bring ion the elements of the blue and white tarp, select it, feather it, blur it, etc… and then take the bike, copy it, invert it, to become the reflection, feather the edges so it looks soft not, give it some blur, surface reflection blur, all over another background, on the ground, contrived to be black like asphalt…
THe sky reflected in the windshield leads me to believe that much of the light/white clored element behind the bike, looking like grayish stuf/smoke even, is most likely the clouds in the sky, but tilted like this, they appear more to be the horizon, but the aren’t the right color for the horizon, so this points back to the bike being vertical when shot, and these clouds are fairly high in the sky, which looks right.
Back to the reflection of the bike, you can tell that it is a photoshop manipulated reflection, because the reflection image is from the same perspective as the original photograph. If it had been a true reflection, you would see differences to what you saw, especially the letters of "YAMAHA" would present themselves from a much lower angle, and the tops of the letters may get cropped off.
I could see about 1.5- 2.5 hours of photography, and about one – two hours retouching, depending on the skill level of the retoucher, provided that you had the blue and white tarp image to drop into the composite.
All the best to you in your learning path… 🙂
Paul Kiler
www.kilerphoto.com
