October's Child
Elements: 60 faces scanned from my own photos on film, leaves on forest floor… shot with Canon EOS-100 SLR, blended in PS CS2....
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Elements: 60 faces scanned from my own photos on film, leaves on forest floor… shot with Canon EOS-100 SLR, blended in PS CS2.
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Jan, 2015Views
606
Likes
Awards
People's Choice in Do you believe in magic? Photo Challenge
Outstanding Creativity
Top Choice
Superb Composition
Magnificent Capture
Superior Skill
Absolute Masterpiece
Genius
All Star
Peer Award
Virtuoso
Top Ranks
Top 30 rankTop 30 rankTop 20 rank week 2Top 20 rank week 1
Billyboy
January 30, 2015
Yer a bit late Gigi, but I'll give you a heads-up when I do the next one :-)
Billyboy
March 13, 2015
This is probably the image that took me longer to do than any other... all 60 faces were on film so each needed to be scanned and processed one at a time. Labor of love. Thanks so much for the appreciation :-)
Billyboy
April 16, 2015
Thanks for the appreciation Karine, makes me feel it was worth all the time and effort !
PRO
elued29
April 16, 2015
It's really OUTSTANDING CREATIVITY and probably
a LOT of work!?!?!
BRAVISSIMO!
a LOT of work!?!?!
BRAVISSIMO!
PRO+
EG-Keith
April 30, 2017
AMAZING! What a great amount and quality of work! Not to mention the creativity, of course. This image should be "hors concours" sinc it's not comparable to any other one. I have no words to express how much I like this picture and I feel almost embarrassed to remove it from my top favorites in the challenge that I'm hosting (Leaves). It's a difficult decision, but I decided to keep other great images in which the leaves, or the leaf, are pictured in a natural way. It's the criterion I adopted in order to make this mission of narrowing down my favorites a little less impossible. Anyway, there were 3,935 entries in the challenge and my vote placed yours in 53rd. Congratulations, and thanks so much for participating with such a unique image!
Billyboy
April 30, 2017
I was in 2 minds about putting this forward in the challenge when I noticed it was virtually the only one that was manipulated. So you are right in removing it from your selection and I'm really happy you took the time to explain. Having said that, your appreciation of the image and the work that went into it is actually more valuable to me than ranking high in a challenge. So many thanks for your comment, and cheers for the like and the award!!
Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
Behind The Lens
Location
Original photo was taken of the woodland floor in the Forêt de Soignes near Brussels, Belgium.Time
Time of day was early morning after an evening rain.Lighting
The overcast lighting was important so as not to have problems with blown out areas where the water reflected the sky.Equipment
My equipment at the time was a Canon EOS-100 film camera with 28-80 USM zoom lens. Film was Fuji Reala color print film (100 ISO), and I used a tripod to avoid camera shake using a relatively small aperture under subdued lighting. No flash.Inspiration
The inspiration to take the initial picture simply came from my love of autumn woods. But it's probably the same thing that inspired me to add the faces… the beauty of each leaf seemed to give each its own character and personality. I had such a multitude of portraits (mainly of my daughter) so I thought I'd dig them out and put them to use. For me, the leaves had to be female :-)Editing
Obviously this is all about the post pro. It was the most time consuming project I'd ever done in photography as the portraits were on film so they had to be scanned individually and then each face had to be isolated from its background and presented over a suitable leaf. I used the Luminosity layer blending mode in Photoshop 4 (yeah, this was a while ago, before everyone was using PS :-) to blend the faces with the leaves as it tended to retain the topography of the facial features while blending in the leaf textures and colors. I helped the process by erasing the leaf texture where it interfered with the eyes, noses and mouths. The skin color of my models helped in the choice of which faces to use on which leaves… the darker complexions worked best with the darker leaves. There are about 60 faces in all, and for me the coolest thing is that if you look in a place where you don't think there's a face, there probably actually IS one. And yes, it took me ages to count them too :-)In my camera bag
These days I carry a Canon EOS 5D MkIII with three lenses: EF24-105 L IS which came with the camera; EF16-35 L which remains a big favorite; and an old EF 100 mm macro which I used on my film camera, and in spite of the ancient clunky autofocus mechanics it's probably the best quality lens in my kit. It doubles beautifully as a portrait lens and I wouldn't be without it! I've also got a hot shoe flash, exposure meter, a couple of filters from the film days, spare batteries and flash cards, mini tripod and a Gary Fong flash diffuser. Outside the bag are two Elinchrom flash heads with 60 cm soft boxes, and a super heavy-duty tripod with a top class ball fitting.Feedback
As I went into some detail describing the post pro involved with this picture, the only remaining advice I can give to anyone trying the same… you need patience. Bags of it. And there is nothing more important than attention to detail. Once I'd had all the leaves on all the faces, I tweaked the final flattened image for ages (mainly as regards levels, contrast and saturation) before considering it a finished piece. Of course, I always made sure I kept a version with all the layers just in case something went wrong. And as computers so often crashed with Photoshop back in the time, I saved my work every few minutes !!
