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... 

Before... and after...

The BEFORE

 The AFTER

I processed this photo in Lightroom 4. I adjusted the shadows, highlights, whites, and blacks before using a preset to change it to high contrast black and white. 

The BEFORE

 The AFTER

In Lightroom 4 I adjusted the shadows, highlights, whites, and blacks. Then I brightened the blues and greens. I also darkened the photo a bit.

The BEFORE 

The AFTER

In Lightroom 4 I adjusted the shadows, highlights, whites, and blacks. I brightened the blues and greens. I also removed the green wood and warmed it up to a more wood-like color. My favorite part of this photo is the moon which is visible near the mast on the far right. 

First attempt at Adobe Lightroom

I put a question out to my G+ community asking if anyone knew of photoshop tutorials that I could use to improve my quite bad processing abilities. I was referred to some Youtube videos created by a French photographer named Serge Ramelli. The first video I watched was a basic introduction to Adobe's Lightroom photography program. 


I do not have Lightroom. I have a program I downloaded from Apple for $3. I downloaded a trial of Lightroom to try this tutorial out and see how I liked it before I invested any money into it.


Serge starts off with a sunset photo, so I went into my photos and grabbed the first sunset picture I came across that I hadn't attempted to process yet. I hadn't processed it because it was bad. It was blurry and washed out and all around blah. I figured, what's the worst that can happen? I find out this picture is unusable and I go search for a new photo or wait until tonight and take a new one to use. 


So here is what I started off with:

I then watched Serge's tutorial (which can be found on Youtube here) and edited my photo along with him, pausing frequently to play around.

After about an hour of playing around I ended up with this:

It came out much better than I expected! I am actually pretty pleased with this picture. Of course, I would be happier if it wasn't blurry, but I softened the image and made it all a little fuzzy so that the blurriness was not so bad. All in all I am satisfied that I have saved this picture!

I think I may end up buying Lightroom. I am going to try a few more tutorials first before I make my final decision.

Off to Canada!

I just got back from my first trip to Canada! We drove up from northern Maine and crossed the bridge over the St. John River to Edmundston. There was not much to do over there, but we drove around and had lunch.

The bridge to Canada

  

I was convinced we were going to die on the bridge. We were stopped for a long time and I dislike bridges!

Straight down to the river. This is what we drove over. Apparently it's so the snow can go right through in the winter.

We had to stop at customs.

Sideways stoplight! 

We got lost. This is the hotel that we stopped at to get directions.  They were very nice, as was the hotel.

There was a ?paper? factory

Cute footbridge

Look! Canadian ducks!

Look! Canadian seagull! 

Look! Canadian tree!

Look! Canadian spider!

We went to KFC, which is called PFK, and my husband got his fries Poutin (with cheese and gravy) GROSS! 

Everything was in French. I don't speak French... I could read most of the signs though! 

The Moon Over St. Francis

I took some photographs of the moon tonight from my in-laws' driveway in northern Maine. There was a LOT of cloud cover, so no stars this time, but the moon was clear.

I think these are the best moon shots I've taken.

Reflection of the moon and trees in the car in the driveway.