Saturday Morning in the Garden

Bliss

The art and secret of compositing

I was sitting by my ocean view cottage and relaxing in this idyllic place reading a book.

It was a story about dolphins.

It was a warm and sunny day, what you expect in dog days of June in Key west where my cottage was. The sky was blue, the ocean at its best and a flock of geese flying far away.

I was reading about these mischievous dolphins when my lazy eyes drooped and I may have dozed off.

I put mu glasses down by the book and slowly shut my eye to savor the best the life has to offer.

Suddenly I woke up with a start, and saw that my book became the ocean and a friendly dolphin jumped out of it spilling sea water on the table. I looked beyond and there was a large wave of surf with another dolphin jumping over it and two more ready to go.

Was this a day dream?

Now the secrets. 

How was this composite done. 

It always start with fantasy, imagination and pre visualization. 

I thought about this fantasy while actually reading a book. Then I bought images from a stock photo service.

The first image I bought was that of an open book on a table looking at a calm ocean on a summer day. see below. 

OK now in Photoshop CS6 I created selection of the open page. 

Then I inserted the second image of Ocean in the clipping mask. 

Then I brought the rest of the Ocean and sky in the background replacing the currant sky and clouds

Are you with me so far

Now it was a matter of bringing the elements of these images, the wave, the Dolphins, the flock of geese and glasses on the table. 

And for the final touch of the piece de resistance I created drops of spilled ocean water on the table and the shadow for the glasses to make the believable.
 

The art of compositing

The art of compositing dates back to many years. Movie poster makers have been doing this with paper cutouts of photographs and painting over them since early 20th century.

Photoshop in digital era enhanced this to higher form.

I took 3 stock images and composited in Photoshop to create and imaginary movie poster of a hurricane engulfing London bridge.

Pansy

Pansy

The pansy flower is two to three inches in diameter and has two slightly overlapping upper petals, two side petals, and a single bottom petal with a slight beard emanating from the flower's center. The plant may grow to nine inches in height, and prefers sun to varying degrees and well-draining soils.

In the early years of the 19th century, Lady Mary Elizabeth Bennet (1785–1861), daughter of the Lord of Tankerville, collected and cultivated every sort of Viola tricolor (commonly, heartsease) she could procure in her father's garden at Walton-upon-Thames, Surrey. Under the supervision of her gardener, William Richardson, a large variety of plants was produced via cross-breeding. In 1812, she introduced her pansies to the horticultural world, and, in 1813, Mr. Lee, a well-known florist and nurseryman, further cultivated the flower. Other nurserymen followed Lee's example, and the pansy became a favorite among the public.

The Pansy has figured in literature and the visual arts. In William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the juice of the heartsease (Pansy) is a love potion and "on sleeping eyelids laid, will make a man or woman madly dote upon the next live creature that it sees."

 In Hamlet, Ophelia distributes flowers with the remark, "There's pansies, that's for thoughts"

Margaret Mitchell originally chose Pansy as the name of her Gone with the Wind heroine, but settled on Scarlett just before the book went into print.

Georgia O'Keeffe created a painting of a black pansy called simply, Pansy and followed it with White Pansy in 1927. J. J. Grandville created a fantasy flower called Pensée in his Fleurs Animées, and the 1953 Disney animated film Alice in Wonderland featured a chorus of singing pansies in the Garden of Live Flowers scene.

Summer Flowers

Sunrise at Zabriskie Point

Sunrise at Zabriskie Point

Zabriskie Point is a part of Amargosa Range located east of Death Valley in Death Valley National Park in the United States noted for its erosional landscape. It is composed of sediments from Furnace Creek Lake, which dried up 5 million years ago—long before Death Valley came into existence.

The location was named after Christian Brevoort Zabriskie, vice-president and general manager of the Pacific Coast Borax Company in the early 20th century. The company's twenty-mule teams were used to transport borax from its mining operations in Death Valley.

The sunrises are spectacular in winter when moon is aligned. The near rocks are in shadows and far rocks are gloriously illuminated by rising sun.

You need to be there by 5 AM and ready to go.

The Road to Paradise

Patterns in sand with rays of morning sun

Rose