I was commissioned to create a poster for the EU funded H2020 project. They required a shot of the Earth, without clouds, with the Med as the central focus point and the sun coming over the horizon of the Earth......

 

As you can guess, that kind of photo didnt exist. So I had to create it.

 

1. download a very large flattened photo stitch of the Earth from NASA, something like 21000 pixels wide.

2. take the image and map it over a sphere in 3d studio max, not the whole sphere though as i only wanted the Mediterranean.

3. render out at 300 dpi to go on a 1.2m by .70 m poster

4. create the fake horizon and sun burst on the horizon (to the right) using photoshop.

 

I think its pretty convincing. They were happy with the result seeing as this did not exist previously.

Full shot of the poster, including arabic, french and english text.

Zoom on Africa, greece and Turkey area in the med.

Zoom on the sun burst i created along with the horizon glow. Very ethereal

Apart from the fact that the inital problem was to create the image big enough for print at high resolution and large format. We also had the issue of Arabic, which doesnt play well with western systems, but again, i found a nice little work around that allows you to copy from word (which supports arabic RTL) then into a special PSD template that adobe have produced > create paths from type and then into illustrator.

 

It was a bit of work, but well worth it.

 

I will be uploading the photographs soon.