I got total cooperation from my subject as I took lots of shots over three days. The hard part was using the x-acto knife to cut him out after I printed the silhouette in different sizes (sorry he's a fake).
This was one of those rare times that I knew EXACTLY what I wanted to do. Almost all of my outtakes are of the same composition, orientation, and crop. Another hard part was finding the right leaf. I wanted one with a lot of veins, preferably of a contrasting color like red and one in which I could capture a lot of detail.
I took a lot of shots at Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden where a lot of passerbys were interested to see this frog that I was photographing. So, over and over again, I pulled the leaf down and surprised them with this paper cutout. I told them that I had to cheat because I couldn't get my subject to stay still long enough. For the fun of it, I left one of my 'subjects' on a high leaf along the path for others to discover.
For THIS particular shot I took a leaf home with me and taped it to my sliding glass door during the day to take advantage of the backlighting. Initially, I was getting a lot of reflection on my side of the leaf, so I had to block all of the light entering from outside. This was one of the many, many problems that I encountered over the past three days. This was the first time that I have attempted something like this and it was definitely a learning experience.
Post processing - - -
*Opened RAW in Nikon Capture and saved to Jpeg
*Opened in Photoshop CS2
*Reduced highlights with highlight tool
*Levels
*Cropped with slight rotation for vertical alignment
*Hue adjustment
*Saturation increase in red and master
*Levels in RGB and master
*Brought out detail in lower part of the stem with Shadow tool
*Brightness and Contrast
*Unsharp
*Added border(s)
I revisited this image for day two of post processing - - -
*Using selective color layers, made the green greener and the red redder.
*Brightness/contrast on both layers
*Flattened and Brightness/contrast again
*Done (again!)
I think that's it. I hope that it does well. Others have been predicting their score so I'll toss my prediction out there - - - 6.2. We'll see.
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Place: 1 out of 343 Avg (all users): 7.2404 Avg (commenters): 8.4545 Avg (participants): 7.2234 Avg (non-participants): 7.2544 Views since voting: 11362 Views during voting: 339 Votes: 208 Comments: 45 Favorites: 33 (view)
i totally love this shot. our teacher always talks about that with leaves you have to have a lizard or something. this is just AWESOME!!!
Good job on getting the ribbon (:
Hello Robert,
Two things here that really need addressing and I am sorry to be so harsh here but.
(1) The faking of any wildlife or nature is totally unacceptable !!!!
(2) Disturbing or removing any living element from it's natural setting is also unacceptable !!!!.
Rainforest
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