Photoshop Mashup

My mashup started primarily because I was looking aimlessly through creativecommons.org and came across the picture of the astronaut driving the lunar rover. I found it at NASA's website, which interested me because I found out that everything NASA has is public domain unless specifically stated otherwise. I knew at once that I needed to incorporate him into some sort of race. I started out with pictured from nascar, but couldn't find one where the street was the right angle.  I then started exploring the idea of having him driving past a bunch of jockeys in a horse race. Again no luck finding one where the ground was at a proper angle. After that I found a nice road picture on flickr of a road that had a good curve. I had the idea of having him zip past an Amish buggy, but I couldn't find a picture that worked, and it's probably for the best that I leave religion out of it. I found the awkward carriage jockey and decided to use him. After putting the pieces in place I realized that his hand was awkwardly doing nothing so I flipped it, making him wave, which still looked weird so I fashioned his hand into the finger.
The biggest issue I had with this project was the lighting. Since the picture from the moon was taken on the moon, where there's only one light source parts of the astronaut are completely blacked out by his shadow. Since I couldn't change the lighting on him to fit the project, I had to change the lighting on everything else to match him. That was difficult because the jockey and the road both had different shadow schemes too. All of the shadows on the ground are fake, as well as the wall shadow because the road's picture was taken at approximately noon. On top of this I had to fashion the front right tire out of the front left tire because it was completely blacked out as well as clear out the wheels on the buggy and put speed spokes in there. After that I added some smoke around the tires to make it seem as if he were accelerating very quickly. The very last thing I did was flip the image horizontally, which put the buggy on the correct side of the road to be driving on, and the astronaut on the correct side to be passing him. It turned out to be a pretty difficult project, which amounted from a simple idea of putting an astronaut in a race. Personally (and I'm not one to usually toot my own horn) I think its hilarious.
If forced to explain it in today's society, which is so bent on figuring out hidden meanings, I guess I would have to say that this is a portrayal of modern technological advances happening so quickly that older still useful methods are being thrown to the side, disrespected. The astronaut speeding past the jockey represents how quickly technology advances, and the fact that he's flipping the jockey off portrays new technologies as being disrespectful and or ignorant of old methods.