Step on Cloud

This was my first time seeing this kind of fishing method in my Yangjiang, China trip in 2005.

The fishmen put a extremely long net into the sea before dawn.
More than 20 fishmen pull the net back to the seashore when the first twilight reached the ground.

The scene was not as beautiful as you see now.
I drew a new scene based on what I saw in my mind.


Having what I needed in my head, it was not the time to press the shutter button, but to organize objects I were going to shoot.
I made the net look like a "S" shape instead of spaghetti.

Someone may argue we should not manipulate what we see.
I agree if it is used for documentary.

A photographer is also an artist if she/he treats photography as a visual art.
Re-organization and creation is part of an art.
It requires a photographer to have a sense of art.


I always ask people to take beautiful photos of sky, sea or tree.
Those photos become your photo library.
Then you can find the required components from your library.

The above photo of sky is taken from my photo library.

You might retort components such as the sky, the sea etc can be found in Internet.
As a photographer or visual artist, the originality of works is a must.
If you mix others' works into your own work, who is the original artist?


Now, I put the cloud photo and fishmen photo in 2 layers as shown above.

The cloud photo is used for the reflection on the seashore.
Please refer to the next photo.

Note:
The layer mode of fishmen layer is hard light.

I cut the top part of the cloud photo because it is something else, but it won't affect the output because it is the area of sky. I will give the fishmen photo a more beautiful sky later.


This is what we see when I put the cloud and fishmen photo in 2 layers and set the fishmen photo's layer mode to hard light.


Now, I found a suitable sky from my photo library.
Again, do you see how important is a photo library?

Please do create one for yourself now!

The lower part of the sky photo is something else, so I cut it.
It does not matter because it is enough to cover the sky of the fishmen photo.


There are the arrangement of the 3 layers.
The top layer is the sky. The middle layer is the fishmen. The bottom layer is the cloud.

I put a layer mask for the sky layer because the sky photo overlaps the sea of the fishmen photo, so I used a layer mask to hide the extra lower portion of sky.


The is the outcome after applying a layer mask for the sky layer.


As usual, the last step is to adjust the contrast because people in digital world love rich colors.

Do NOT just press the shutter button.
Please also try to design and draw your own picture while shooting photos.