{elevate} a Fine Art Photography Exploration | February

FOG

I love it!  Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, our mornings are often blanketed with thick fog.  It lasts until just about the time I drop off the last of my kids at school.  I can not tell you how many mornings I’ve been driving through the fog on carpool duty loooooonging to stop the car, pile the kids out into the beautiful fog and photograph them.  But of course, that isn’t realistic.  The kids have no desire to pose out in the damp chill first thing in the morning and I definitely wouldn’t want to try to explain to the office lady why they are late for school.  So needless to say, we hadn’t been able to capture the foggy mornings…

until last week.  My daughter had to miss school one morning for a doctor appointment across the bay, and that morning just happened to be full of fog.  I wasn’t sure if the fog would last until I dropped the boys off at school, but I grabbed my camera just in case.  Luck was on our side and there was just enough fog lingering, once my carpool duties were done, to drive up to the hills for a few shots before heading to the doctor.  My vision for this image included a billowing white gown, trees, and mysterious fog.  Well, I failed to share this plan with my daughter, so she was wearing comfy sweats and sneakers instead.  I knew I wouldn’t have another opportunity for a fog session before this {elevate} post was due, so we forged ahead and shot anyway.

I’ve decided to share my before and after images for this post.  There are so many steps involved in creating these Fine Art Photography images and I wanted to give you a little sense of how manipulation is often involved in some of the images.  Some are more manipulated than others, but this one has some obvious changes.

This is the before, SOOC (straight out of the camera) image I decided to use.

You can see there was a pile of wood on the left side that I removed.  I’ve got the trees that I wanted as well as the fog.  What I’m missing is the dress.  I decided to go with black instead of white since she is already wearing black.  I decided to add a skirt instead a dress and found the perfect one when I Googled.  I saved it, cut, and pasted it onto her and then played around with it to size it just right.  I then had to add some grass to the bottom of the skirt to make it look more natural.  Then I converted it to black and white and added a little more fog.  I used  Florabella’s whitewash texture  set to luminosity, smoothed out the fog a bit more, played around with the selective color blacks and neutrals until I liked what I saw, and saved it.  I came back to the image a few more times and tweaked a few things that I didn’t like.  All in all I’m pretty happy with the final image.  I do miss the white billowing gown, but I’ll save that for another foggy morning.

I hope you’ll make the rounds to the other girls participating this month.  I can’t wait to see what they’ve come up with!  Head on over to Renee Popat | Hyderabad Photographer, the newest member of our circle.