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February Style It Challenge

Another month, another challenge!

This time the challenge that +lane langmade and +Shantha Marie Fountain set before us was Fantasy with the added challenge of Natural Light!

Well, I only ever use natural night... I have no lighting equipment or anything like that, but I know that my lighting techniques need a lot of work! So off to research I went!
I found out how to make my own reflector at home, so that is something that I will endeavor to do.

I called up my two go-to models, Maggie and Jill, and asked if they were interested. I set the photo shoot date for February vacation, where I will have more time and so will they since we all work in education! They confirmed their interest.

Then it was time to decide WHAT to do.

This was my original idea scribble.

I decided that I wanted to try a levitation photo. I've always wanted to try to do one and this seemed like the perfect opportunity! My idea is that one girl will be levitating in the air, she could be a witch or fairy, with or without wings, doesn't matter to me as long as she looks DRAMATIC AND CRAZY! The other girl will be on the ground looking up to her. She could be normal, or she could also be a DRAMATIC AND CRAZY fairy or witch, either way. She could even be levitating just slightly off the ground too. In between the girls I want to have them both reaching for something. This could be a dragon (dragons are AWESOME and necessary whenever possible!) or it could be the sun, or the moon, or a generic orb. Maybe even a beautiful rose or something?

Next, OFF TO PINTREST! Time to search through images of fantasy photos and tutorials for levitation. I already know *generally* how to do it, but it doesn't hurt to find a tutorial.


AND THEN that happened! I had grandiose plans, an idea I was really excited for... BUT we signed on a fantastic townhouse and have about 2 weeks to pack up and move. The hasty packing and moving process meant that my photo plans had to be put aside for the time being. I totally plan to try this idea out later on, I am still excited about it. Now is just not the time.

I was wicked bummed that I wouldn't have a photo to submit this month. On a packing break I decided to go through some of my unprocessed photos to see if there was anything I could use for this fantasy/natural light challenge. Like I said earlier, most of my photos are using natural light, so that would not be much of a challenge. And the photo shoots I did with my two models were all fantasy-ish.  Not too bad. Searching through I found a couple possibilities.

In the end I went with the most simple one, and the one that took me the least amount of time... because it just looked the best. Sometimes simple is best. At least when you are short on time, energy, and brain power! 

My submission:

So this is actually from the same photo-shoot as my January submission. My model, Maggie, was doing her steam punk thing. Towards the end of the day we started getting silly. I set my camera on long exposure around sunset and Maggie walked towards the camera. It created a ghosting effect. I manipulated the photo in Lightroom. I put it into two-tone with brown and cream. I added vignetting and increased the grain on the photo to make it look older. I decided to call it The Haunted River Walk. 

January Style It Challenge

Google + has a new feature, Communities.

I have joined in a few photography communities, primarily ones that issue weekly or monthly challenges. It is nice to have an assignment or a goal to reach.

One group is a Style It, Shoot it, Share it group, where you have to design and style a photo and then manage to make it happen.

To be honest, January is a bad month for me. It is busy at work, it is my birthday, my stepdad's birthday, and it was my dad's birthday which is always a rough day for me. In addition to being busy with those things, I got the flu (despite getting a flu shot!!) and was out of commission for a week. I got a late start on this challenge. I didn't start it until a week before it was due. Oops!

So the challenge was to create a photo that includes two elements, apocalypse and a created background. I had NO idea what a "created background" really meant, luckily one of the lovely moderators, Lane Langmade, and some others in the group got right on that to help me understand. There are a few types of "created" backgrounds, modify an existing background, create a background, or composite a background digitally.

I decided to push myself and learn how to digitally composite.

Another aspect of this community is that you are encouraged to share HOW you accomplished your photo. That is where this blog entry comes in!!

Here is my finished shot:



The picture is primarily two photos with bits and pieces of a few others added in for effect. The two main photos are these ones:

I took these photos a few months back. The model is a friend Maggie, epic costumer geek and filled with awesome. This is her Steampunk reporter character and the shoot was a lot of fun. We roamed all over the old mill city of Lowell and used the old mill buildings as a backdrop. 

I grabbed some smoke and fire photos from google images and took just tiny slices off of them. I didn't have any photos that would work for those in my repertoire. I did have a few "burning embers" type photos that I used for fire raining from the sky and explosion type effects. These two photos are from a number of months ago. They are of my friend Kitch playing with steel wool. That was a lot of fun, and gladly nobody called the cops on the group of people playing with fire in the parking lot. 

As I was working on the photo composition, adding things in together and processing, I went through a few stages. There were a couple times that I thought, this is good, I think I might be done. Then I decided that I was not and kept going. This may or may not be for the best...