Wow! Thanks everyone who voted and commented! I’d like to express my appreciation at your seeing fit to make my highest scoring image one of roaches and my foot! I’m sure it will take me a few years to get this off of my front page. Really, though…this challenge was a great deal of fun.
When this challenge came up, my creative forces swirled into a vortex which pulled it's energy from a variety of ideas and personal fascinations:
1. A deep love and respect for Gary Larson's work.
2. A longstanding private joke about the juxtaposition of roaches and humans.
3. A great appreciation for, and desire to emulate, the work of scalvert .
4. A talent for creating miniature sculptures with self-hardening clay.
5. A combined fixation on insects, and repulsion for roaches.
6. A dark and twisted sense of humor.
I started working on this setup immediately after the announcement of the challenge and struggled with quite a few distractions during the week. This version was submitted at the literal last minute; and I was quite disappointed with the shoddy editing. I would have liked to submit it in color; however the only good lighting I have is my "God's lightbox" (in other words...natural light under cloud cover). Since I was unable to capture any roaches until the very last day (One of which I stole from a spider...half eaten), I was under severe time constraints to complete this setup. God decided to complicate matters by filling my ligthbox with rain as I tried to shoot.
I live in an RV, and was forced to create a studio somewhere inside (with only an hour or two to spare), in order to shoot this project.
The lighting is terrible, and I struggled for quite some time before coming up with this setup:
Due to the substandard lighting conditions, the colors were very bad, and I could not correct them. At the very last moment, I converted to B/W and submitted. Here is the original, color version:
Post Processing (all done in 7 minutes!):
Channel Mixer (Desaturate)
Crop
Levels Adjustment
Layers
Gaussian Blur (BG layer)
Erase (FG layer)
Clone distractions
Blur distractions
Burn
Dodge
Flatten
Resize
USM
Save for web
Inspirations for my setup:
Statistics
Place: 5 out of 80 Avg (all users): 7.0717 Avg (commenters): 8.6471 Avg (participants): 6.8387 Avg (non-participants): 7.1342 Views since voting: 8192 Views during voting: 854 Votes: 293 Comments: 39 Favorites: 6 (view)
Congratulations on a great score and a top 5 finish. So well deserved. My husband and I had this absolutely pegged during voting as an original Scalvert. So perfectly done. And your lighting setup is genius (not to mention hilarious)! I always use God's lightbox too. So they really were real roaches? I mean they look like it and everything but eewwww! :) What we won't do in the name of art! Rock on sister!
Thanks everyone for the kind comments! I was absolutely shocked when my score started out so high and stayed there!
Thank you Robin for noticing the details in my setup. I did, indeed make them all from scratch, including the garbage art (which I have decided to keep). The chair, clock and picture frame were sculpted from self-hardening clay. That was the easiest part of the whole thing. Finding and posing the roaches was obviously the hardest. I'll never forget the way my husband reacted when he realized what I was doing! He must really love me to put up with the critters I constantly bring inside.
Congratulations on your top finish and high score. Thanks for sharing the setup too. You did a fantastic job and I am so impressed that you were able to work with dead roaches and put them cute poses!
Love all the little details...doilies on the chair, cuckoo clock, and the adorable framed garbage-art tilted slightly. I have to wonder if you made everything yourself from scratch.
Congrats on your first 7! This is a very creative image in the true spirit of Gary Larson. Hard to believe it has been so long since his comic strip has been discontinued. You captured his warped sense of humor perfectly.
Wow Roxanne - congratulations on the finish! Excellent shot! Very true to topic and well executed. I really like the b/w processing - the right choice. Got a laugh from this one which I used as a partial gauge for scoring in this challenge...this scored well with me. Great job! I love it!
LOL!!! How brilliantly perfect. This is not only hillarious, but a superb photo. Nice texture and details, and I like the choice of black and white. I really hope that this ribbons!
Somewhat reminds me of one of Scalvert´s shots, don´t remember wich one but had a mouse in it. For me personally, this is not as good but still good enough for a 7 from me, I think I would have preferred it in color, have a feeling it lost some of it´s punch by going b/w.
Yes, the smart irony again, what I love in the style of Gary Larson. I remember my HR lecturer showing us a Gary Larson one with bugs and an A-bomb disaster. The point absolutely caught here. Maybe the bug in the armchair could be a little-little bit sharper.
Back to comment. A thing of beauty...I could never guess whose this is! :) I can't wait to see if these are real roaches - they sure look like it - eeew! Very nicely set up & executed. I like that you did the thought bubble instead of just working in the title. Perfect. Top 5 for sure...maybe the blue IMO - one for the collection. Good luck!
Great shot, great editing. Feels like the winner all the way. Would guess this is a Scalvert shot - if it is way to go. If its not then WAY TO GO!!!! Bumping up to the top!
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