Graveyard Incantation
Oct, 2016Views
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Awards
Fall Award 2020
Superb Composition
Outstanding Creativity
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Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
Behind The Lens
Location
I took pictures of components of Halloween displays in various front yards of people in my neighborhood. I am always collecting shots of interesting subjects, even when I don't have a particular composite in mind.Time
About mid-day. The sun was going in and out of the clouds.Lighting
Ideally, I try to shoot pictures I'll be using in composites in as flat a light as possible. You can always add highlights and shadows, but it's hard to even them out if the light is strong. In this case, it didn't matter so much because everything was going to be distorted and in shadow anyway.Equipment
Canon 5D Mark iii with a EF24-105 F4/L IS USM lens. I shot handheld, no flash.Inspiration
I am always shooting pictures of interesting subjects with the intent of building a library of components for future composites. Most of the shots are not outstanding enough for me to want to process them as "keepers" individually, but I do have the files stored away for potential future use. It gives me great joy to have an idea for an image and to know I already have the components on my external drive. When I see something an interesting subject, I've learned to take pictures from several different perspectives and lens lengths. A subject might be perfect in concept but useless if shot only from the front instead of from the side, etc.Editing
Hahaha! Yes, the real work was in the post-processing. I use Photoshop to create layers with masks that isolate the parts of the pictures. The image creation is often quite iterative, with different components being tried and discarded, and a lot of moving layers around and resizing to get a good composition. Then I clone in bits that aren't available in my original shots. I used the Transform=&bt;Warp function and the Liquify filter to shape the emerging skeleton. Once all the pieces were in place, I created a layer with the entire image and used a Topaz Restyle night filter to change day into night. I did some masking to reduce opacity of parts of the filtered layer to get the look I wanted.In my camera bag
I travel light because I get excited when I'm shooting and either forget to use attachments or put them down and lose them. These days I'm shooting with a Nikon D810 with a 28-300 mm lens, which covers pretty much everything. Besides that, some lens wipes and maybe a polarizing filter or ND filters and I'm happy. I also use pictures I take with my iPhone 7 for use in composites. Those file size can't approach my Nikon images, but it doesn't matter when it's a relatively small part of the finished image. The trick with those is to do a lens correction in your post processing before incorporating the picture into a composite, or else you can get unwanted distortion.Feedback
Composites are a lot of fun and can really stretch your creativity. Take lots of pictures of anything that is interesting, and develop a really good filing system so you can find what you need later. Check out other people's work for inspiration and enjoyment. Make sketches or notes of ideas as soon as you have them, because the ideas fade away faster than you'd think. Be patient; get pictures of the components you want before you start processing, because you probably won't want to go back through the process for the same concept again even if you get a better shot of one component. Be open to new ideas as you're creating the image; sometimes it can lead you to an even better image than you first imagined.
