Itchy and Scratching
I've always loved this tree. It is right near the parking lot at Stafford Lake in Novato, CA which is the best place around for a full 18 holes of Frisbee Golf. So usually when I pass this tree I have a frisbee, but no camera. Yesterday I was having a late afternoon nap and I suddenly awoke thinking about this tree, so I looked outside and saw that I had maybe an hour of daylight left, so I grabbed my gear and headed down to Novato. I got there at about 6pm, the park closes at 7. The sun had already set behind the hills surrounding this valley, so I knew I was going to need my strobes. I put one strobe on a gorillapod, affixed a diffuser and placed it under the canopy of the tree, off camera to the left. This was used to light the branches extending off of the main trunk and the side of the main trunk. Then I placed a second strobe on a light stand facing the tree about 20 feet back. THis strobe lit up the ground, the leaves in the front of the tree and a bit of fill on the main trunk. The third strobe, my Canon 430ex was placed on the ground and propped up with a log. The light from this strobe is what you see on the ground on the right.
The three strobes were fired using Cactus V2 triggers. As is often the case with the cactus triggers in outdoor situations, and particularly when trying to use a Canon flash, I had a lot of misfires and shots where two of three or one of three strobes fired. I took about 50 shots in all to get this one, but I was moving the strobes around a lot.
I took the final shot with my 10-22mm lens, laying on the ground in front of the tree.
In PS, the only thing I really had to do was add in the eye and a little bit of the nose, and darken the crack that is the mouth. The basic shape of the nose and mouth were provided by nature. I posted a little tutorial on texture wrapping a while back. This images uses essentially the same technique.
I also used an adjustment layer to soften the flare of the flash on the grass, and cropped and rotated the image to straighten the horizon.
I also did a version where the mouth was showing teeth, and the eye had an eyebrow, but it seemed like too much, so I reverted back to something a little more subtle.
