How did I do it? – Shadows

With this post I’d like to start a series that explains how I did get to my images. The texts and sometimes screencasts are not meant to be complete tutorials for the software I used. Nor do I claim that the way I do it is the only or the best way to do it. Yet I hope you might find these posts helpful or at least inspirational. So – how did I do it?

Location

In this first episode I’d like to demonstrate how I created the image above. It is called “Shadows #1” and it was taken pretty close to my home on an old pit-head stocks in the Ruhr area. The place is out of use and has been renaturated. On top there is an installation of steles which makes the top of the hill look as if it was crowned. There is also an amphitheater there where various music and drama performances take place. Here you can see where it is located.

Concept

The idea was to combine a standard and an ICM photo of the steles so that they begin to fade away near the top. I had done something similar with a photo of the Frankfurt skyline before:

In the Frankfurt shot the blur was created in Photoshop. This time I wanted to use ICM for the same effect. Here are the two original photos I started with:

The first thing to do was to overlay and blend the two images in Photoshop:

I then used the wonderful Analog Efex Pro 2 from the Nik Collection to add some more effects like motion blur, textures, split toning, etc. Check out the following video to see the filters and settings I used in this program.

To wrap this post up, here are the other versions of the image. You can browse it right here on this page.

I’d appreciate any kind of comment underneath this post. Thank you for reading and watching.