Behind the shutter
While browsing my library of images, my attention was caught by an image of a marsh taken in October 2006, in Palo Alto, CA on Renee’s birthday. For some reasons, I felt that the image was lacking of expression and started to experiment. I thought about adding some mood or maybe some “feature” to it using elements of another image.
Here is the starting image of the marsh:
Nikon D50 • Nikkor 80-200mm
110mm • 1/3200s (ev -1.67) • f/7.1
10.11.2006 8:51AM
I remembered I had taken some moonlight shot in RAW format and had them somewhere in Picasa. That series of full-moon shots had some nice clouds too. Here is one of those moonlight shots I used:
Nikon D50 • Nikkor 80-200mm
200mm • 1/200s (ev -1.67) • f/2.8
5.1.2007 22:20PM
The rest was pretty straight forward: I overlaid the two images, painting masks with the brush tool to blend the two in a more natural or realistic view, creating a new horizon line (much lower than the one of the original marsh view). I also added a few effect layers (brightness, contrast, and curves) to bring the two images to the same range of greys.
The final image keeps the strong geometric pattern made by the decayed wood sticks in the water and their reflections. The addition of the clouds, their reflection on the water, and the sun (well… the moon) create the feeling of the morning fog that was missing that day.
Update: I submitted this picture to the Palo Alto Camera competition in the Monochrome category on 7.11.07 and the judge (Glenn Corlew) awarded it the first place. The main criteria was the mood that the image caries. The fact that the image is a composition doesn’t matter much as long as the final image has a strong interest. This is a pictorial category and that level of editing is permitted.