farewell

Happy new year everyone! In my last post I made a quick resume of 2014, as a way to say goodbye to the year that passed. For the first picture of 2015, I chose one that I took during my summer holidays at the beach. It might be just slightly off season, since it is now the middle of winter, but it is also probably the most technically demanding picture that I have edited.

 

farewell

To understand how much editing went into this I should tell you that the original file I ended up with is over 11 thousand pixels and 2.5 GB big. At some point I had to save it as a psb because psd could not support the size of it. I used three different shots for the main part with the rocks which came together really nicely, but when I expanded it to get a square frame, I was left with a huge blank space where the sky should be. I knew that I had to use a different picture for the sky, but what I didn’t realize right away, was that because the image was already too big, one sky picture was not near enough to fill the space. I could take this one picture and strech it, but it would look really awful. By my calculations, I needed about six different pictures to get the sky right. All this time I would take pictures whenever there was a nice sky, but I never seemed to get it right. Luckily I can see plenty of sky from my new home, so I had the opportunity to get it right finally. It was really helpful that I also discovered how to automatically align layers in photoshop, which saved me tons of time. So finally, it is ready to be shared with the world!

For the moment it seems like I won’t have time to go out shooting anytime soon, but luckily I still have unedited shots from the summer, so I will try to find time to work on them instead.

florescence

I am so happy I spent most of my summer running around with my camera, taking pictures. This one was taken while I stayed at my father’s village, up in the mountains, one of my favorite places in this world.

One afternoon I took my equipment and went for a walk in the forest. My dad came with me so he could go around gathering herbs, like oregano. Our mountain is full of wonderful things like that. So, we came upon this field and of course I set my tripod and started running around like crazy. I tried some things including my black umbrella first, but I didn’t really like the outcome, so it was time for the red sheet to come out. I decided to wave it around so I could later make the fabric look like flower petals. I used the same techinque (and the same sheet) as in “the inner tempest“. I also added the birds later to give my composition more balance. What do you think?

Fun fact: in some of these shots you can actually see my dad entering the frame in the right bottom corner, unsuspicious, gathering herbs and then looking at me, wondering why his youngest daughter is tossing a red sheet around a field. Some cliks later he is gone again leaving me to do my thing. It was really funny to discover this when I uploaded the pictures to my pc.