Please share you behind the scenes or
The Curious Camel
Registered Users Posts: 943 Major grins
anything (processing perhaps) about your #17 entry that you would like to share with us all.
You basically know mine, it was pretty straightforward but how about Sean, Kerry, pyroPrints and some others that want to share how they went about putting their work together.
I always learned so much from that and really miss it.
Thanks, gail
You basically know mine, it was pretty straightforward but how about Sean, Kerry, pyroPrints and some others that want to share how they went about putting their work together.
I always learned so much from that and really miss it.
Thanks, gail
0
Comments
Absolutely! C'mon you composite wizards -please do share!
well mine was mostly a cool concept inspired by this:
and some processing. This is the original shot
I cloned out the EMS logos, extended the wall, played around with the colors (multiple techniques: selective color, overlays, etc ), some sharpening, and the 10:4 pano
result:
pyroPrints.com/5819572 The Photo Section
Yippe, thanks, I really like the placement you decided on this to. Really made it stand out for me even more. Thanks for sharing.
My walls are yellow downstairs, so I turned off all the lights in my living room and placed an SB800 on the couch behind where I would sit, the head at 90 degrees (pointing straight toward the camera). I triggered it remotely with the on-camera pop-up flash (I lurv my new D700
I flipped my hair a couple different ways. The one that worked best was pulling my hair forward over my right shoulder and then lifting it with my left hand (arm over the top of my head). I would then pull/yank my hand upward and back over to my left side, with a flip of the wrist to fling the hair.
For processing, I actually combined two shots to get the facial expression I wanted plus the tips of my hair.
Base shot (bad face and tips of hair cut off, but hair flip good):
Added face from another shot:
And tips of hair from a shot with a similar flip motion:
Then rotated the merged layers:
And cloned out things that would be inside the crop:
Cropped and ran this action to get my final result:
It made my hair look like fire, and I was immediately reminded of my favorite lines from Sylvia Plath's poem Lady Lazarus: "Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ and I eat men like air." Hence the title.
Mine too is not really that complicated this time around. The idea came to me while brainstorming that incense smoke would look both organic and hair like if put into the right context.
I had never actually shot incense smoke before and I am kind of glad I waited to have a purpose behind doing it. Frankly its not something I want to do very often as its well... smokey
I set up my black felt backdrop and one of my trusty Vivitar 285HV flash units to the right of the incense to achieve about 150 or so frames of smoke. Yes, 150 why that many? because it is so uncontrollable and random that I wanted to make sure I did not have to do that step again. In the end I only used 7 frames from that shoot. You can see one of them here:
Next we needed a beautiful Medusa. My wife was happy to oblige once I explained my idea, so we spent about an hour perfecting this shot again in front of black felt and the same one flash set to telephoto zoom to narrow its beam so as to not light up the surrounding area.
A slight amount of cloning and softening of facial lines was done as well removing the bright area near her mouth to balance out the shadows on her face. Next I used Hue/Saturation to match her skin tones to the bluish smoky trails of the incense smoke. Using hue left her original eye color and I brought back just enough of the original red for her lips to keep her looking more alive than dead (Blue is not traditionally a great skin tone)
Canvas Size was adjusted to give more room for Medusa's hair and each lock of hair was added as a separate layer in "screen" mode. I also used the Transform/Warp tool to fine tune the positioning of some of the curls.
Lastly the title Medusa's Metamorphoses was inspired from (book 4:1181-95) of Ovid's, Metamorphoses, a 15 book Poem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses
Beyond all others she
was famed for beauty, and the envious hope
of many suitors. Words would fail to tell
the glory of her hair, most wonderful
of all her charms--A friend declared to me
he saw its lovely splendour. Fame declares
the Sovereign of the Sea attained her love
in chaste Minerva's temple. While enraged
she turned her head away and held her shield
before her eyes. To punish that great crime
Minerva changed the Gorgon's splendid hair
to serpents horrible. And now to strike
her foes with fear, she wears upon her breast
those awful vipers--creatures of her rage.
Pretty straight forward.
____________
I am continually amazed to see how each of us puts things together
both Pyro and Llywellyn's behind the scenes are very interesting to read and I very much enjoyed finding out that Kerry used several frames to create the final image.
Thanks.
Thanks and keep them coming.
The background here is a pop up black/white reversable background, and because of space limitations the Bg was only about 18" behind the model.
I have a 24"x12" softbox powered by a cheap ebay 150Ws strobe triggered optically, just out of view camera left, literally about 12-18" from the models hand, and aimed slightly towards the camera so as to keep as much light as possible off the background.
Then to catch and illuminate the spray I mounted my 580EXII flash on a short light stand aimed up and towards the camera, positioned ( from the camera's vew ) behind and out of sight below her shoulder. The 580EXII was triggered via poverty wizards ( aka ebay 16ch wireless transmitter / reciever set ), and was set to 1/8th power and the head zoomed to 85mm to tighten the beam. The resulting flash then triggered the softbox strobe.
It then took many many shots to try to capture the spray right as the model could not see where she was aiming the can. ( I think by the end of the session her hair was as solid as a rock!!! )
Then in PP I darkened the Bg, lightened the hair a bit to bring out the details, a little tidying up of a few stray hairs, masked off the green can and converted the masked off section to B&W to remove the distracting green, tidied up the edges of where the can met the hand as the green had reflected onto the skin, added saturation to the red nails, a little local contrast usm, then final sharpening usm, and this was the result.
Tim
The shot I entered
others I didn't enter
Sherstone mentioned he would have liked to see another eye on the background chicken well unfortunately some of these birds can't see at all because their hair like feathers grow over their eyes...
I did cosider entering this shot... I call it "Punk Rock rooster"
Winston
I am absolutely stunned at your work. Amazing. When I first saw it entered in DSS17, I though wow thats a lot of photoshopping (I thought the hair was digitally created)....and yet...now I see the hair is an actual photo!!! I couldn't believe it. Simply amazing. Shows me how much more I have yet to learn about photography and what you can REALLY do with it.
Goodness.. And here I was thinking that you had hung upside down from a gym bar to get it...
You remind of that newly famous person who does only self-portraits. You don't seem to be running out of ideas for them!
www.HoofClix.com / Personal Facebook / Facebook Page
and I do believe its true.. that there are roads left in both of our shoes..
Armed with my limited camera gear I had to relocate to the floor for a comfortable spot. I could not put the sides on my DIY light box because the girls must lay on each side. I tethered the A640 so that my 5 yr old could watch and hold her attention long enough for the photos. One light, some mirrors, and long shutter speed made up for my lack of equipment.
See what I mean?
Look at all that hair !
Multiple shots like this composed into the nest.
A shot after they got up so I could get the hidden part of the dragons and over expose the background.
A photo of snow for background texture aimed at the suns reflection.
And last, some creative post processing...
The final image !!!
I really wanted to enter the contest but was short on time... which explains the blur between the nest and the background.
I'm an artist that enjoys photography which will inspire/provide some really strange, warped images.
I really enjoy participating in the challenges. Thanks Dgrin!
Troy
Velvet-Art- Thank you for the insight into your light setup... I too face very similar challenges and I find it really cool to hear about how others deal with them.
Troy - That was my biggest question ... where did all the hair come from for the nest? really cool to see how you pulled it off. Thanks.
Gail your are not going to get off that easy -- yes your shot may be straightforward.. but what were your thoughts behind it.. what motivated you to try such an extreme angle? Basically some more insight into what you were thinking and hoping for.
:smo
I set up two lights one on camera left, behind her a bit... and one to camera right.
Shot a while until I got one with the right pose and expression for the back girl. My thought process at this point was a bit of "dreaming of how life could be", thus the holes in the jeans (which ended up cloned out) and straggly hair. This was the base image for the final photo. And don't you just love that huge speck of sensor dust I had to get rid of?
I had her hop down and we really quickly curled her hair. (We didn't do the back since I knew it wouldn't be in the final shot.)
She knew the plan was to have her hair straight in one and curly in another and she said that all she really wished was that her hair was red... So that was the inspiration behind that. Besides- the difference between the curly shot and the straight just wasn't being communicated enough.
This was the mask I used, and then I painted her hair by selecting a color of red from a real redhead that I had on file and using a soft "color" brush. The masking was the hardest part as always- those little tiny hairs take forever.
I cleaned up the background a bit, fixed her jeans and there you go!
Ok, ok, I'll try.
I kept watch daily of the entries of all you and I wanted to do something obvious but with a slightly different angle that we were all use to seeing. I kept looking at my husband and you could see in his face my wheels were Turing so I finally asked if he would mind helping me out. Being the great guy he is he said sure.
If you could have seen me trying for these it would have made you laugh. I purposely asked him not to shave or clean up around his mustache and he obliged.
I realize nose hairs can be somewhat gross but after I uploaded the shots I was amazed at how cool a real close of them looks.
Still not satisfied I tried another shot. My brother reminded me to upload to get your opinions and I'm glad that all of you agreed with what I thought was the most unique shot.
Ok Sean, how'd I do?:D
That was pretty clever Heather...
Winston
You Betcha!
looks great to me THANKS for taking the time to elaborate.
Hey! I have those dragons around the house too