Illusion of Frost and Snow

Our next quest, given to us by Duchess Teacher were to create the illusion of ice to confuse the villagers.

Do not be alarmed, the first two are actual ice. Chill dudes.... You see what I did there? The first two are taken with my cellphone camera.

The first picture shows a vast landscape of ice, with a soft curve around a mountain. The flakes does give away it's not real, but since there are no other objects revealing the actual size of the objects, it's sort of believable. 

Made with the help of my partner in crime's legs, I got to enhance the wave effect so to me, it looks like a frozen tsunami. The light through the ice gives it the feeling that it's a clear wave.

Now to begin the summoning of the illusion.

"Cast: Awesome photo skills"

 Look at mah caves.

If you tilt your head to the right, or just turn your laptop towards the right, you'll see how it actually looks. Though I feel it's more interesting with this angle.

The reason for that is the spiral effect   in the bottom half is enhanced, though It may not look like ice, but I find it pleasing.

 My favourite. To me this is perfect, you have the reflection, the water dripping from the cave side, and the light is not that extreme. Also, the shadow in the background to the left does sort of look like a guy in a boat.

Aaaand a mixture of both.

Real ice: Multiply layer prosperity, Cooling filter, Higher contrast and lower lighting

Fake: Overlay, Red filter, Higher contrast and lower lighting.

Top 5

So as the title suggest, I'll put up what I believe to be my best pictures of the autumn semester, telling why I like them and what I did to achieve the composition. The order is set when during the semester they were taken, also I've focused on pictures not seen on the blog before. None has been edited in any way.

One of the first pictures I took. I quite like this because you get the deep contrast, the blurry background, all in all the feeling of nature this picture represent for me. I got this by laying down in the meadow with the light coming from behind the tree tops to the right. 

 I know what you're thinking... "Wasn't this supposed to be pictures you've taken?" But to your amazement I have taken this, with my pro photographer skills. I like this quite for the same reasons as picture #1, though here with a more... "wondrous"(?) feel to it, I guess. 

Contrast, contrast, thee be giving thy charm to my pictures. As you might have guessed by my pictures, I love 'em dark with a high contrast. The arch from the road gives the picture more dynamics, while the "wannabe cartoon mouse" cloud shines ever so brightly on the road.

I adore fire pictures, there's so much dynamic and interesting effects from placing your cold body in front of the stove with your trusty phone in your hand, snapping pictures while the flame is turning purple/pink.

This picture to me seems close to mystical, because of (without over thinking it) the different shades of fire, possibly caused by ink, paper or cover. I chose to take a close up to get the focus on the book as well as the flames. This might also have been a better Christmas card picture towards the other assignment, because it's... Cosy.

Last picture, another dark one. Snowy forest, the sun hidden by the "mountains" of trees and the feeling of cold. This picture I got while walking back after trying really hard to get a "cosy" Christmas card base for another project, since I like the blue, cold colours. Though this is what winter represent's to me, it's not the common interpretation of Christmas.

Carving the Edges

 

 This time we were told to carve out a threshold picture of ourselves in lino. Since the light source is coming artificially from above and naturally from the right side of the photo, the shadows came out like this, much to my liking. I picked this picture out of the others mainly out of the expression it had.

 Now here came the tricky part; How the  kittens am I going to carve all those fine details?  I cant't find my scalpel anywhere, so I would have to settle with the school supplies.

Here I'm obviously halfway through.

I kept getting this feeling something would go wrong, and it did; My hairline got loose, I lost part of my nose and my mouth and my face got rounder. 

 Personally I prefer the one on the left, it's more interesting in the print than the one on the right. Though towards the assignment I chose the right one, since we are supposed to mass produce the print, and the distortion in the left one is not possible to recreate.