Whenever I post any of my unusual or surreal composites, I always wonder if anyone is going to like them. For the first 10 years of my career, 90% of what I created -- and this was the film era -- was anything but real. Fast forward to the present and that ratio has changed dramatically. My favorite genre is wildlife and nature photography, but when I come across what looks like an abandoned haunted house like this one on the turquoise trail in New Mexico, a normal, straight shot of it seems mundane, almost boring. It seems to me this calls for something . . . strange or bizarre or spooky or visually compelling. The light and the mood have to be just right. So, this is a composite of four images. The sky, the house with the trees, the grasses in the foreground, and the coyote. I photographed the coyote in Bosque del Apache just the day before with a 500mm focal length, and it was already in tall grass. That's why it blended so well with the grass in the foreground. To composite those grasses with the picture of the house, I used a layer mask. To add the coyote, I cloned from one photo to another with a slightly lowered opacity. Finally, I desaturated the foreground elements to match the mood and tonality of the structure.
0 Comments