Recent Competition Pictures

I'm really behind in posting these, BUT here are my latest photos from Faerie Folk.  I'm still hanging in there, but our current assignment is a mutha -- lol I'm horrible at making more than one pic at a time (which is required for this assignment), so we'll see what happens...o_O....anyway.......feel free to check out the actual comp threads to see all of the amazing shots from the competitors (well worth the time, kid you not) and read my accompanying stories - I linked each in the titles below.


Assignment #3:  Fairy Tales
We had to come up with our own fairy tale, and adjust it to be a Good or Evil story depending on the orientation of our model.  Ennui is evil and she has an Asian-inspired background, so I chose a Japanese-influenced setting for the photo and story.  I never was completely happy with this pic and I swear I'm going to re-shoot it someday.  It was a lot of fun to work with though, the setting in particular.

So often we make extras for our pictures, and many times they are barely seen in the shots.  That was the case with Queen Sen - I spent a good amount of time (read = forfrikkinever) creating her in CAS, but she doesn't show up very well in my submitted picture.  This was an outtake shot of her that was sharpened a little in Photoshop

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Assignment #4:  The Five Senses
This theme has been done in a few other comps, and it always seems easy from the start, but coming up with something really good or unusual is really difficult.  Again, this wasn't any sort of spectacular pic -- and oh GAWD was my real life a mess during that time -- but I love the soft glow on the male model.  Much of that effect was with in-game lighting.  This is another photo that I wanted to do over again SO badly, and some of my outtake/unused shots were better than what I submitted, so I really want to work with some of those in the future. And oh yeah - I chose Sense of Touch.

...wish my hair was that doggone shiny...

An outtake picture that I edited a bit in Photoshop...I had waaaayyyyhayyhayyyy too much fun working with this guy... ;)

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Assignment #5:  Switching Roles!
The concept for this assignment seemed easy enough:  our faerie models had to switch their orientation, so Good faeries had to be Evil, and vice-versa.  I had intended for Ennui to be 'Good' in the first place, but the Good Faerie slots filled up fast and she went eeeeevil.  The execution of the assignment was another story -- there were nearly limitless possibilities of what we could do with our models and pictures, so focusing in on one idea was a huge challenge.  After the previous picture, I wanted something a little more lighthearted, so I thought 'hey, why not go to jail!' or something along those lines.

The rails, ceiling, and top half of the right-hand wall are edited in, and also the "stripe" on the ground, made to look grungy

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Assignment #6:  Chakras
Yee-haw -- there were several comments all around about how difficult this theme was in Blair's last cycle of Faerie Folk, and boy were they right.  The research was absolutely fascinating and I came away from it learning a great deal; coming up with the right image, however, was absolutely INSANE.  I had no idea what in the world I would do for this one.

We were allowed to choose from the seven Chakras, and by the time I saw the assignment thread there were only 3 left:  Manipura (fire/navel), Anahata (air/heart), and Vishuddha (ether/throat).  A couple of Chakras that I would've wanted to try were taken, and I wasn't sure I could do much of anything with what was left.  I decided to go with Anahata because of the air element, and by the time I made my decision and tried to reply, someone had taken it.  Vishuddha sounded a little more difficult, but also pretty intriguing....the element of ether particularly.  After reading a quick bit about it, I knew that's what I wanted to go with.  It was a pain in the ass to get just the right angles and lighting....you have no idea....but I was actually (for once) pretty happy with the final result, and I got a good avatar picture from the outtakes also.  I think my total time working on this from start to finish was around....17 hours or so?  Give or take a couple of hours (and over the course of three days).  That's pretty normal for me -- anywhere from, say, 12 to 20+ hours per shot.  Takes a long time when you barely know what the hell you're doing, no joke.

I laughed out loud when I finally found the right (and very unlikely) pose for this...it's hard to see, but I added the Vishuddha symbol into the vapor coming from Ennui's mouth. Also, the animal symbol for Vishuddha is the elephant, hence the tiny, almost invisible elephant statue in the bottom right corner.

I ended up with a great forum avatar from an outtake face shot

Two more plays a tweaking the coloring; the color for Vishuddha is blue so I experimented with a few other color options (too many to post now, heh)

Midsummer Night's Trance

Hypnotic Stardust

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Annnd I guess that's all for now.  We're on Assignment #7 currently (pictures representing two flowers of our choosing), and I'm literally shaking in my Cat in the Hat slippers -- I'm clueless as to what to do for these shots, and not in a good 'meh, I'll get a burst of inspiration at the last minute' sort of way...it's pretty scary.  BUT hopefully they'll be good enough to survive another round.  There are absolutely no guarantees with competitions.

If you made it this far, thanks so much for browsing!  There are so many more pictures I want to post....I think I'll end up making a companion blog to showcase outtakes, CAS pictures, and the like.  I usually take a couple or few hundred shots per project/assignment, and there's pretty much always something funny or cool that results from the masses.