Flowers of Fire

The warmth of these flowers was almost more than I could bare...

Good start of the work week Monday.

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Caution Tech Stuff:

This started life as 10 pictures of a fire burning in a outdoor, park shelter fireplace. I took 8 of the 10 and placed them side by side into a long 8 image ribbon. Then I squeezed the ribbon square. Then using the polar coordinates command I turned it polar. Not knowing what I was doing next I started erasing the edges using a mask to make it round and that was going to be my blip,,,,, or not.

In our kitchen I found a black flower vase with flowers in it. I shot with 2 lights one on either side. I traced around the outside of the flowers and vase and placed it against some black.

I then one by one started dragging in the polar fire images and placed each one on top of a flower. I rotated and distorted each polar fire to take on it's position in the image.

So far so good till I blew it up and I noticed that I could see the edges of the masks as lite thin lines encompassing each polar fire. Oh my heavens as I had to one by one paint the edges of the masks to remove these little lines. I found myself painting onto of the flowers instead of painting to the masks. That mistake turned into an additional nightmare as I had to back track and redo a lot of the mask painting.

I quickly cleaned the vase when I shot it but noticed later that I left water spots all over the place. Note to self: Black glass must be perfectly clean before shooting. That stuff shows everything. So now I have to fix that in post. Bummer.

So I'm ready to post but decide that a black vase on a black background is pretty dumb looking so I added a red gradient. That idea uncovered more stuff that needed cleaning which meant more post.

I now like this and hope you do to. It was a bag load of work but the results look pretty good. Enjoy...

P.S. I'm not hiding in the foliage (but what a great idea)...