Dale May | NY Advertising Photographer, Director & CGI Artist

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1974 | Case Study| Hybrid Photography & CGI | Dale May

1974

"Today she starts a new life. Dressed to conceal the secrets she'll leave behind."

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Concept Development, Art Direction, Studio Photography, Photorealistic CGI Environment Creation, Compositing & Post-Production | 2022

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"1974" is a hybrid photography and CGI personal project created by Dale May in 2022, combining a studio portrait of actress Emily Shephard, originally photographed three years earlier, with a new studio shoot of Dale's five-year-old son Damien, composited into a fully CGI-built 1970s American small town environment rendered in Blender 3D. The project demonstrates how the hybrid method can transform and elevate existing photography into an entirely new cinematic narrative years after the original shoot.

1974: Studio portrait of actress Emily Shephard in vintage 1970s wardrobe holding a garden trowel, the 2019 photograph the CGI environment was later built around. Studio photography by Dale May.

The concept

This image began as a collaboration with my friend and frequent creative partner, actress Emily Shephard. Emily and I have an ongoing working relationship built around a simple creative exchange: she supplies the wardrobe and I build concepts around what she brings. When I asked if she had anything that felt like the 1970s, she showed me a collection of vintage fashion that hit me right away. A character arrived fully formed.

She would be a 1970s housewife. Always impeccably dressed, always composed, always smiling at the right moments. But underneath that, an independent woman who desperately wanted out. I photographed her in studio in vintage 70s wardrobe, with period-appropriate hair and makeup, holding a garden trowel with her hands covered in dirt. She looked dressed for an evening out. She also looked like she had just buried something or someone in the backyard. The tension between those two readings was exactly what I was after.

That image lived in my portfolio for three years. It was a strong portrait, but the story felt incomplete. The character had nowhere to be.

Then in 2022, after spending the Covid pandemic learning CGI, I looked at that image again and finally saw where she was going. She was a mother in a small Americana town. She had a son. She was standing on a street corner in front of a vintage Oldsmobile, dressed to perfection, about to cross to the other side. A patch of warm sunlight fell only on them, the rest of the street sitting in cool shadow. An optimistic sign. She was headed to the bank to empty the joint accounts before her husband noticed anything was wrong. If she looked composed, looked the part, there would be less suspicion. The CGI gave me the world the photograph had always been waiting for.

1974 behind the scenes: Dale May directing his young son Damien in the Fairfield, CT home studio for the 2022 half of the composite.

The challenge

The core challenge of this project was a collaboration separated by three years and two different studios. Emily had been photographed in my Brooklyn studio in 2019. My son Damien, who would play her son in the final image, was shot in my home studio in Fairfield, CT in 2022. The lighting between both shoots had to match precisely enough to survive a seamless composite. There was no margin for a lighting mismatch, the entire emotional truth of the image depended on the two subjects feeling like they existed in the same moment, in the same light, on the same street.

Working with a five-year-old presented its own distinct challenge. Damien had no frame of reference for what multiple takes meant or why the same moment needed to be captured differently each time. I needed a very specific look from him, something quiet, slightly withdrawn, a child old enough to sense that something was changing but too young to understand what. Directing that out of a child that age requires patience, timing, and a willingness to let the session run its own course.

As it turned out, Damien's growing impatience with the shoot became the performance. The moment he started getting fed up, it registered on camera exactly as the emotional quality the image needed. Sometimes the best direction is knowing when to stop directing.

The approach

The original Emily shoot had been lit and styled with no specific CGI environment in mind, which meant the 2022 environment build had to reverse-engineer her lighting rather than the other way around. I studied the original studio frames carefully: light direction, color temperature, shadow quality, and built the Blender scene to match. The patch of warm directional sunlight isolating the subjects against the cooler surrounding street was constructed specifically to honor what already existed in the photography rather than impose something new on top of it. CGI allowed me to control the lighting in an entire town.

For Damien's shoot, I matched the lighting setup from the original Emily session as precisely as possible, using reference from the three-year-old frames as a technical guide. His long hair at the time was what sparked the 70s connection in the first place. It had exactly the right period quality to sit naturally next to Emily's vintage wardrobe and styling. That detail, which I hadn't planned, ended up being the key that made the generational pairing feel authentic.

The hand holding the two subjects together required composite surgery. I replaced the garden trowel entirely and built the connecting hand from a combination of my wife Beth's hand and Emily's hand, selecting the best elements from each and blending them into a seamless join that read as completely natural in the final frame.

For the environment, I used premade assets from the Kitbash 3D Americana collection as the structural foundation, supplemented by an Oldsmobile model from my existing asset library. The bulk of the texturing work had to be rebuilt from scratch across both sources: weathering, aging, material wear, to bring everything to the same level of period-accurate realism. I also customized a number of the town's storefronts individually to avoid the repetition that comes with stock architectural assets. Having the core assets already in hand, combined with a fully resolved image in my head before I touched the software, allowed the entire project, including Damien's shoot, to come together in two days.

Behind the scenes

The result

"1974" won five international awards: a Communication Arts Award of Excellence in the 64th Photography Annual 2023, an International Photography Awards Honorable Mention 2023, a Prix de la Photographie Paris PX3 Gold Award 2023, a ReFocus Awards Gold 2023, and a 3rd Place Honor of Distinction from the International Color Awards. The project was among the body of work that contributed to Dale May being named to Lürzer's Archive 200best Digital Artists 2022/23 and 200best Advertising Photographers 2025/26.

The image is a demonstration of something the hybrid method makes uniquely possible: a photograph taken in one decade of your career can become a different, more complete work in another. The CGI doesn't replace the photography. It finishes the story the photography always contained.

The image

1974: The final award-winning composite, a 1970s mother and son in front of a vintage Oldsmobile in a CGI-built Americana small town. Hybrid studio photography and photorealistic CGI by Dale May.

Credits

Photography, CGI, Art Direction & Post-Production: Dale May

Agent: WSWcreative

Actress: Emily Shephard

Son: Damien Stryker May

Hair: Corey Tuttle

Makeup: Clara Rae

Working with Dale

Emily's portrait was never a failure waiting to be fixed. It was a finished picture I was proud of, and it sat in my portfolio for three years doing exactly what it was supposed to do. What it carried was a hint. Dirt on her hands, dressed for an evening out, and no explanation offered for either. A mood, not a plot. Learning CGI is what let me follow that hint and find out what the rest of the story was.

So I went back to a 2019 studio frame and built the street it had always implied: the town, the Oldsmobile, the patch of light falling only on her. Then I photographed my son three years after the original session and matched him into that same light. The result won five international awards. The photograph did not get better. It got bigger.

For a client, that is worth more than a technique. A campaign you already shot and already like can be extended without a reshoot. A finished frame can be given a second life in a place that never existed. Elements photographed months and miles apart can be matched closely enough in light and color that nobody reads them as separate. If you have work you want more from, or a campaign that needs a location nobody can scout, that is exactly what I build for.

To discuss how this approach can streamline your next project, get in touch or see more Personal Work.

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