A re-edit of a popular favorite that shows just how much I have learned in the last eight months. I joined DPC nearly a month after this shot was taken on the road out from Great Sand Dunes National Park to Mosca. I pulled over when I glanced in the mirror and immediately realized what I needed to shoot.
If you look closely, the hazy line at the base of the mountains is actually the sand dunes. It's an interesting bit of perspective, to see how small the dunes actually are compared to the mountains surrounding them when we're accustomed to seeing them portrayed as looming giants.
Post-processing involved removing some contrails, along filling the right side of the mirror with the road (just your basic cloning job) and matching the horizons to maintain the illusion of continuity that I was going for (selected the horizon, free transform to skew and rotate, then a healing brush to fix the lines it created). There was a duplicate layer in overlay mode, dodging and burning, particularly on the mountains, a saturation boost in the yellow channel, some selective color to kill the really bright "hello BLUE!" shade of blue without cutting the saturation, and the blue was further muted by a pass with the draganizer action. Some selective levels on the mirror, and dragazining was removed from most of the road with a very soft eraser brush. Finished up with a resize and a smart sharpen. There may have been more, but they would have been basic adjustment levels.
Original edit, from before I knew how to do anything:
Statistics
Place: 83 out of 712 Avg (all users): 6.5330 Avg (commenters): 7.6750 Avg (participants): 6.5038 Avg (non-participants): 6.6207 Views since voting: 2262 Views during voting: 538 Votes: 349 Comments: 51 Favorites: 8 (view)
... WOW! Just amazing. I love "optical illusion"ish stuff like this. Works very, very well here as everything is so smooth... by that I mean when I look at it it just SEEMS real - no attention is drawn to the behind-the-scenes setup, for me.
Excellent composition! Maybe you should crop near half of the sky and left until the start of the yellow strip. All the attention should go for the mirror. Anyway, great job!
Intriguing and impressive: and there's a reversal of colours in the mirror and reality too - just to point things up a little further. I would, of course, prefer this in black and white, but that's a valid choice. I like also that the 'mirage' isn't quite perfectly placed to match the background - just enough to let us know it isn't a missing mirrir or something.
i hate the concept of photos taken in a car but you managed to do it in a creative and very interesting way. i love how the road appears to continue but the distant landscape changes dirastically.
Cool perspective and good success in lining up the two road surfaces and the horizons. This concept has a whole ton of possibilities. You've presented this well. Good luck!
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
