This week I published my latest work called “Lost at Dawn”. It is a composite I made from a background photo I took at the port of Scheveningen and studio shots of models Melissa, Nick and Vera.
As usual I published on my 500px page also. On 500px.com images that get a lot of likes will receive pulse points. The more pulse the populair the photo becomes. With this photo I saw the pulse skyrocket up to finally a 99.4 score which is a new personal best for me.
Of course I am very proud an thankful for all the attention this gave me. I received over 130 comments on the image and it got over 3100 views. This is of course great exposure for me and the models in the photo who have all worked on this on a TFP basis.
The background image is a HDR shot made out of three exposures:
Mid-exposure shot
HDR tonemapped:
At first I visioned this composite with a female model in a black dress that would look out of place or lost after a long night of clubbing. During a couple of photoshoots I took photo’s of models for this composite but never really found the right one until model Melissa showed up with her pink dress. At that moment I knew I had to try her photo in this composite.
The visherman/robber with the knife is my girlfriend posing in a coat we bought for this composite and a kitchen knife. I took that photo last sunday when I was nearly done with the composite.
The other fisherman/robber is model Nick who had posed for me last year. I won a price with one of the shots from that shoot a while back. I never planned on a second robber in the image but when I tried it, it looked really nice so I left Nick in the composite.
The three models Melissa, Nick and Vera:
Compositing was relatively easy. The biggest problem I encountered was turning the cloudy middle of the day photo of the background into a believable dawn photo.
The photo of Melissa was the only model photo I had to do some skin retouching on and the photo of model Vera needed some adjustment of the sleeve. I did that using the liquify filter and some heavy dodge and burning.
After placing the cut-outs in the scene I color-corrected all of them to fit the scene by adding a solid color adjustment layer on top of them with a brownish/orange color (sampled from the concrete of the docks) in the blend-mode color at an opacity of around 20%. This way the colors are more believable.
Melissa and Nick needed some shadows on the concrete and I used some hand-drawn fog around Nick for some extra atmosphere.
When all editing was done I used Nik color effex pro 4 for some extra tonal contrast and the image was done.
Final result:
[singlepic id=246 w=640 h=480 float=center]