From Virtupedia:
"The basic shape of the dragonfly has been recorded in the fossil record for millions of years. It seems appropriate nature would take such a tested body plan and use it in her first experiments with metallic substrate nervous systems. Fossil records of crude metallic nerves appeared shortly after the seventh Great Extinction at the close of the Age of Homo sapiens. Though other classes of animals have since evolved metallic substrate nervous systems, none have perfected it like insects. This fine example of the common copper dragonfly (Odonata cuprum) shows off it's exquisitely innervated wings."
If you had enough patience to draw selections of circuits and if it didn't count as a new feature, this could be done in advanced. However, I used shots of some old motherboards to help select the shapes for me.
Started by catching a dragonfly in my parents' backyard. Doing so played havoc with my allergies as the grass was four feet tall and I was blowing my nose the rest of the day.
Eight minutes in the fridge and the little guy was ready to go (always check them every 3-4 minutes if you are going to do this). He sedately sat on the flower (sitting in a vase outside) for 10-15 minutes before lazily flying away.
I had shot the head-on shots of the motherboards the day before. In processing I would take a good looking rectangular section of circuitry and use transform to shape it roughly to the wing I was working on. I then used a layer mask to erase the parts I did not want (outside the wing and on the black wing sections). After applying the mask to the layer, I used channel mixer and a strong contrast application (+100) to turn the circuits black and white (also known as an alpha channel). I then selected on the white (the circuits) and used that selection on the dragonfly layer to create two adjustment layers of levels and color balance. Levels made them darker (90/.2/235) and color balance added the gold (+100 yellow on shadow/mid/high). I repeated for the four wings and that was it.
I think I may get a comment or two about cropping part of the wings off, but I think on the limited canvas size of DPC one needs to do this from time to time to bring out the detail wanted. I have an outtake with the whole dragonfly and some negative space and I was afraid the circuits got lost.
Personally I love this shot and have high hopes (thus leading to possible high disappointment). I'm not sure if it will compete for a ribbon or not (since expert editing tastes vary and others have much more expert editing skills than me). Here's to hoping!
Statistics
Place: 10 out of 93 Avg (all users): 7.0392 Avg (commenters): 7.8235 Avg (participants): 6.8070 Avg (non-participants): 7.1061 Views since voting: 3933 Views during voting: 543 Votes: 255 Comments: 60 Favorites: 16 (view)
Did I told you before that this image still impressed me after all this days? I think with this shot you captured the best of the two worlds. An excellent photo with a brilliant idea.
Mate - very nicely done, and like the others say, a nice, subtle idea. Congrats on having a living specimen at the end of it too - I shouldn't say how many fly-sicles we produced with that method in 7th form biology experiments... ;)
Oh very well done!!! Just beautiful....this is a delicate, sensitively processed image. So well done that it actually looks "natural" - if you know what I mean!
This was one of my 10s. Congrats on getting in the top ten. I loved that moment of realization when I went from thinking "I can't believe someone entered a flower/dragonfly photo in a Sci-fi challenge" to "Wow!" Beautifully done.
Doc - I think this is my favorite entry in the challenge. I had one of those "Boy, I wish I'd thought of that moments" when I opened this photo. What an extremely clever idea!
sorry doc, I was a bit clueless there on the look-through with voting. now a new early morning, and seeing this fresh...great image & I love the tale about chillin' him out so he'd be a "willing" subject! congrats on Top 10!
i think you were terribly robbed on this one, nothing personal against the other photographers but i believe this is miles above the 2 and 3rd places, i gave a 10 to first so i cant say it should have won but i think 10th is ridiculous
Ohhhh nice. I thought this would be nothing special when I looked at the thumbnail, but I couldn't have been further from the truth. The overlay on the wings looks a very tiny bit less "real" but it is still a very stunning image. Great job.
There's not another entry in this challenge that hits a home run in every category like this one does. It meets the challenge perfectly. The concept is great and the execution perfect (few others can say this). On top of that it's also 100% believable (almost no other contender can say this) and the end product oozes wowness. In this challenge it's the perfect storm.
Very cool and well done. The "chip" pattern fits into the dragon flies wings perfectly and colors work great together. 7 for now and may get a bump before voting ends.
Bad ASS! this took me a second, i was about to start complaining about entering an unedited shot for a EE challenge! this was edited so cleanly! AWESOME AWESOME JOB!! a big fat 10 and a favorite!
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