We call our place the katfarm since I have taken in so many cats...:-) You can see about half of them in this image. The weather finally took a turn yesterday, so I wanted to capture the ominous sky before I headed out to school in the evening. I guess winter finally has reached us in central New Mexico; we actually had a touch of snow this morning. YUK! I hate the cold.
This is a combination of several images; the house and ground is one that the RAW file was tonemapped in Photomatix, and the sky is a set of three RAW images combined and tonemapped in Photomatix. I started with the ground image then increased the canvas size to accommodate the sky HDR image and pasted it in. Since the ground and sky were taken about 10 minutes apart, I had to do some blending of the sky to make it match the bit of sky that was above the house in the base image; I used a layer mask to do this. After I got the sky blended, I created a duplicate copy, flattened it, then I did the following:
Color Efex Pro Tonal Contrast
Color Efex Pro B&W conversion
Vignette created by painting black on new layer set to soft light mode
A bit of dodge and burn in sky
Attempt to remove the worst of the building distortion with distort and liquify
Levels adjustment to increase contrast in clouds even more, foreground masked out
Resize
Add border
ROFL! I should read notes first! I thought somehow you got the white cat to stay in place while you took multiple exposures of the black one. I count 8. How many do you have??
I'm amazed at your processing skills - or should I say "skillz" - I think that's more "current", yes? I'd never know this is a composite. You really do have a way of "seeing" a photograph then creating it very well. It does seem that the cats all sense something ominous approaching and are getting the heck out of Dodge!
From the thumbnail, I could not see the cats and I was like "What? No cats?" So I am relieved ;)
That being said, this is a wonderful HDR shot. All the cats seem to be running away from the storm. The whole shot has a feeling of something pending... Excellent!
This is crazy good! The whole image has this forward motion - through the clouds and the cats running toward us. The light is ominous - and the sky is amazing. Wonderful work!!!
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