Week 9 - Watch the Sky
This week’s theme definitely put the challenge in “Photography Challenge”…
The weather here has not been the most cooperative lately. We have had some very colorful sunsets but they all have all been completely void of clouds. On the other end of the spectrum, we have had a lot of days with clouds but absolutely zero color. Throw in plenty of overcast days, and you have a recipe for a difficult challenge.
My original goal was to do something I read about years ago. I remember this photographer, Matt Molloy, took many photos of sunsets and then blended them all together into one photograph. He typically did this with way more shots, 100+ but I was going to try to do this on a smaller scale, just the week for this challenge.
The first two days of the week, the sky had very pretty colors, but not a single cloud in the sky as far as you could see. I took the shots to at least get the color down, but I was already nervous that my original plan might not work. The rest of the week was the exact opposite story, no color in the sky and/or complete overcast.
My coworker and I were already discussing at work that we were both worried how we were going to possibly do this challenge with the weather we were having. He lives in the middle of the city, so at least I had the ability to get out in nature.
Fast forward to today, I had an idea! What if I take the color in the sky from the first two days of the week and the clouds from the other days of the week and merge them all in Photoshop. This was easily my most complicated Photoshop project I have done so far. I think I ended up with 7 different layers with varying blending options (complete guesswork on which ones do what still…) and a lot of layer masks. I find it so easily to get confused about which layer I am currently working on, which blending option is being applied to which layer and more.
After working on the image for about an hour and a half, my Photoshop goes into “Not Responding” status and pops up an error stating something about Photoshop not being able to utilize any more memory and seconds later my entire machine crashes and restarts. That was very discouraging…I debated not going back in and redoing all the work.
I took a quick break, then came back and redid all the work again, having to rewatch some of the YouTube tutorials again to remind myself how I did something, lol. The second time through didn't take as long.
I will say, the end result came out so much better than I thought was even possible. What you see in this picture is color from two different sunsets and clouds from two separate days.
I was able to use more Photoshop tools that I don't have a lot of experience with, as well as something that forced me to get out with my camera. As usual, when I do these walks I took my faithful companion with me. So at the VERY least, he got to stretch his old legs and feel the wind in his face. I have included a photo of my dog Fynn, he always makes sure I am not lonely on these walks for photos.
