Cyan surrealism

The great thing about a photo tour is that it doesn’t end when you go home. There are hundreds or thousands of images to work on and experiment with. With images from the carnival in Venice, the sky is the limit in terms of creativity because the costumed models are like fantasy creatures. They can be combined with so many environments to make unique and artistic images. I do love the look of the Venetian costumes with medieval backgrounds, such as in Venice, but after doing this photo workshop for over 10 years now, I try to think outside the box. One of the best models in Venice is Sophie Farfalla who makes stunning costumes and poses elegantly for photographers. For this composite, I combined Sophie’s stunning cyan outfit with similarly colored glacial ice from Antarctica plus a section of the Milky Way. The Photoshop plug-in Flood made it easy for Sophie to look ‘grounded’ in the picture. Blending the bottom of a subject with a new environment is difficult and sometimes impossible. A watery reflection solves the problem. I selected Sophie’s deer-themed costume using the quick selection tool in Photoshop and then fine tuned the selection to make it perfect with the lasso tool. I used a 16-35mm wide angle zoom for the portrait, and I photographed Sophie in San Marco Square in Venice competing for space with other photographers.