The model is my little brother, photoshop work is minimal, punched up the red saturation in RAW, applied USM and cropped the image. (didn't like the centered position in the original, hence the crop).
It took me about 2 hours to glue the house of card together (how did you think I did it ?). It is held up on it's pointy ends by two long threads that are taped stuck to the ceiling of my basement. If you look closely at the model's left hand you can actually see the thread (took all of my willpower to not clone it out).
When I first applied USM to the image the thread could easily been seen so I changed the numbers for the USM to 500% , 0.2 radius and 0 threshold. The thread can still been seen if you look closely like I pointed out earlier but it's barely visible so I'm quite happy. To get the spotlight-like lighting I used a powerful flashlight, one of those where you can change the modulation of the light (is modulation the right word anyway?). I taped it to an broom shaft and held it over the model while taking the shot. I moved the flashlight during the exposure to prevent harch shadows.
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Place: 3 out of 124 Avg (all users): 6.5630 Avg (commenters): 7.6897 Avg (participants): 6.2292 Avg (non-participants): 6.6474 Views since voting: 9495 Views during voting: 370 Votes: 238 Comments: 47 Favorites: 16 (view)
Wow - I got lucky to get this shot to critique. Really makes things easy! I can sum the critique up in a word - brilliant! The creativity here is a 10 and your careful preparation really paid off. I would have never noticed the string had you not pointed it out so don't worry about that. Over all you did an excellent job with this challenge and your interpretation of it. Well deserved ribbon. Congrats and good luck on your future challenges.
It's true that you have a great illusion here and it's done very well, and your lighting totally rocks, but for me the star of the show is the model.
There is something about him that really speaks a type of faith that is very "Matrix children". He's got a kind of relaxed stance as he sits there in sock feet with a typical retro, 70's/early 80's style haircut that speaks of being totally unconcerned, be it with physics or anything else.
Wonderful! I enjoy playing with 'illusion' type shots and you have nailed this perfectly. Now the comp is done I hope you lose the thread and print this :)
Very cool image. I like the how the shapes on the floor and the house of cards play off one another - good eye. Great lighting. Good luck in the challenge. 10
You can do anything if you just have faith
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