Photography in the making

I had to start by creating a vision board on what I wanted in this photo, how the lighting would look, what colors I would use, what props I had, how I would edit and use overlays and clipping masks, etc. When I knew the vision I set up my background (this is in my room by the way). I pretty much used every book and fake plant and trinket that I had all shoved up against a window on my desk to make the room look cluttered and busy. I, luckily, also had LED lights on the ceiling so I set those to a light blue. My first photo was of my background, nothing moving, with no pages or books in sight. I guess I should mention now that this one photo you see is made up of about 8 or 9 photos in total. After my background, I set up a stool and set my camera on a tripod with a 10-second counter and posed like I was floating which was incredibly difficult because I was leaning back so far and my core was burnt by the time I finally got a shot that I liked. I took a break and then came back to photograph each individual page. My dad had a single page at the end of a fishing line and held it at different spots in the frame. I ended up with about 30 different pictures of floating pages. The same was done for the book. All 9 photos were layered over each other and merged to get the photo you see now.  The photos were layered in the order I took them with the background being at the back and the pages at the very front. This is so I can erase anything like a stool or unwanted fishing line and still have a photo fully intact.