February Style It Challenge

Another month, another challenge!

This time the challenge that +lane langmade and +Shantha Marie Fountain set before us was Fantasy with the added challenge of Natural Light!

Well, I only ever use natural night... I have no lighting equipment or anything like that, but I know that my lighting techniques need a lot of work! So off to research I went!
I found out how to make my own reflector at home, so that is something that I will endeavor to do.

I called up my two go-to models, Maggie and Jill, and asked if they were interested. I set the photo shoot date for February vacation, where I will have more time and so will they since we all work in education! They confirmed their interest.

Then it was time to decide WHAT to do.

This was my original idea scribble.

I decided that I wanted to try a levitation photo. I've always wanted to try to do one and this seemed like the perfect opportunity! My idea is that one girl will be levitating in the air, she could be a witch or fairy, with or without wings, doesn't matter to me as long as she looks DRAMATIC AND CRAZY! The other girl will be on the ground looking up to her. She could be normal, or she could also be a DRAMATIC AND CRAZY fairy or witch, either way. She could even be levitating just slightly off the ground too. In between the girls I want to have them both reaching for something. This could be a dragon (dragons are AWESOME and necessary whenever possible!) or it could be the sun, or the moon, or a generic orb. Maybe even a beautiful rose or something?

Next, OFF TO PINTREST! Time to search through images of fantasy photos and tutorials for levitation. I already know *generally* how to do it, but it doesn't hurt to find a tutorial.


AND THEN that happened! I had grandiose plans, an idea I was really excited for... BUT we signed on a fantastic townhouse and have about 2 weeks to pack up and move. The hasty packing and moving process meant that my photo plans had to be put aside for the time being. I totally plan to try this idea out later on, I am still excited about it. Now is just not the time.

I was wicked bummed that I wouldn't have a photo to submit this month. On a packing break I decided to go through some of my unprocessed photos to see if there was anything I could use for this fantasy/natural light challenge. Like I said earlier, most of my photos are using natural light, so that would not be much of a challenge. And the photo shoots I did with my two models were all fantasy-ish.  Not too bad. Searching through I found a couple possibilities.

In the end I went with the most simple one, and the one that took me the least amount of time... because it just looked the best. Sometimes simple is best. At least when you are short on time, energy, and brain power! 

My submission:

So this is actually from the same photo-shoot as my January submission. My model, Maggie, was doing her steam punk thing. Towards the end of the day we started getting silly. I set my camera on long exposure around sunset and Maggie walked towards the camera. It created a ghosting effect. I manipulated the photo in Lightroom. I put it into two-tone with brown and cream. I added vignetting and increased the grain on the photo to make it look older. I decided to call it The Haunted River Walk.