Hello everyone,
Phillip Pilkington – Bury Photographer. I wanted to do a show and tell of one of my images. It is of a puddle which I have made into the shape of the UK using Photoshop and my retouching skills, it takes a lot of work to create an image like this and I am going to reveal how it was made.
The first and most important part of this image was to have the concept before starting to take images, having a vision of what you want to create and that if all goes to plan it will be a successful image is so very important, when making this I almost gave up as I became concerned it would not work. It took around 7 hours to retouch in Photoshop and I used 5 different images to create it. I used my Mamiya RZ 67 Pro II medium format film camera, I shot it using slide film and scanned in the slides to my computer.
I took shots of different puddles which had different shapes, I did this so I could cut out small pieces and drop them onto one chosen puddle image from which to build on, using layer masks I could blend the pieces into the main image, the final result is a subtle shape which was my intention, I wanted to include Northern Ireland but I knew that another puddle next to this one wouldn’t look the best. One of my images of puddles had a wet leaf in it and I thought that it would work well.
When I showed the image to others, even to other photographers, they would ask me “how did you find a puddle in that shape” well I didn’t but I shows that the image works so well, deceiving even other professionals is a great accomplishment.
The image won a photography flair competition held by Creativematch website. Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.
Phill.
