Spirits of the Glen

Another piece in my "Visions" project: an ongoing exploration of fantasy; pre-Raphaelite; and Victorian classicism inspired images.

This piece is, believe it or not, very heavily manipulated--just in a highly realistic fashion. It is all the same scene, but I did a lot of painting on the girls (the photo was very noisy--this showed very heavily in their faces, and other skin tones); put in a flowered meadow behind them, instead of the ugly asphalt road and passing bicyclist...

I'm particularly pleased with the depth of field and shadow variations that I got when putting in the flowery meadow. The flowers were taken from a large potted daisy-ish sort of plant that I carted to this shoot...along with bags and bags of other interesting props that I forgot to use!

The other particularly interesting thing about this photo (to me, anyway!) is that it was the first time I used a wonderful technique by Kevin Ames, to smooth skin tones on Stephanie's (the model in brown) legs. (For those who like to know that sort of thing--you add a small amount of monochromatic noise, followed by a gaussian blur, to a layer with the legs masked off on it--then switch the blend mode of the layer to darken, then lowered the opacity to taste. It's counterintuitive--but highly effective! )