When I photographed last week’s shadow image I also shot a few other concepts; the tree girl being one of them. She sat open on my computer for a week, with her tree arms on a plain background, and I kept staring at her thinking there was nothing I could do to make her interesting.
I looked through my Lightroom catalogue at photos of potential locations but nothing felt right so I decided to build a scene from scratch. I started with grass because where else would a tree girl be?
This is the exact same field I used in my shoot two weeks ago, it’s just that the flowers are a bit further up. Then I added a blue solid color layer and used the gradient tool to draw in a sky. I added a flower texture (from Graphic Stock) and some clouds to give the ‘sky’ depth. Simple steps that took no longer than an hour (mostly to find textures) but straight away the image came to life.
Her cherry blossom arm was photographed during the Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers at the botanical gardens. Her bare branch arm was photographed at a beach somewhere (I forget which one.)
I used curves and solid color layers set to ‘soft light’ to tone her. Some of my past photos have been overly complicated so I’ve been experimenting lately with creating simpler images. What do you think of this new direction?