The other evening, I had the notion to take a picture (with my
Atrix 2's camera) of one of our cats hiding underneath the couch. While doing so, I flipped my camera's setting to take a negative image and turned on the "flash". While doing so, it dawned upon me that underneath the couch looks like another planet at that setting. Dust settling down within the focal point looked like snowfall. That gave me an idea to stage some rocks to see what I could come up with. (And yes, you can thank a good case of ADHD for what you'll see.)
The secret to this was to stage a few rocks, shoot it with a negative "exposure" effect and then touch up the image with Pixlr Express for added realism (or to create a fantasy scene.) All of this was done from my phone (except the first and last two, where I added some additional touches on my laptop.) What you'll notice with the result of using the negative exposure effect, is that your brain's interpretation of the image is thrown out the window. You don't immediately recognize that you're looking at fibers in the carpet, for instance. I'm not going to pretend that there isn't a fake feeling to some of these, but would you suspect they're taken on a living room floor? You be the judge. At first glance, they can look rather convincing.
On this first one, I simply laid some stones that I'd collected on a hiking trip in Colorado, as if they were two pieces of a puzzle. After some experimentation, I placed another couple of pieces in front to give it a sense of scale and depth. Afterwards, I cropped the photo, removed the "anti-shadows" (the negative of the shadows cast by the flash) with a clone tool (on my laptop) added a sunlight style effect in Pixlr, and I was done. The end result reminded me of a boulder near a beach you might find out in the Pacific Ocean somewhere.
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Beach Boulder
These next three were taken with some dust-like material. It was my attempt to mimic something you'd see from a space probe visiting Mars. The material I used was some left over Grancrete (a concrete substitute), that I've had for nearly a decade, sprinkled upon a tile where I created a small crater. Over the years, moisture exposure has caused some pieces to clump together and gave it a look as if small, dusty rocks were thrown in.
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| Martian Crater 1 |
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| Martian Crater 2 |
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Mars Lander Landscape
Of course, if you're going to have a probe on Mars, why not have it take a shot of some rocks nearby? So here I went back to the rocks used in my first photo, added in some blowing dust and sun glare with Pixlr, and here's the result.
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| Martian Rock Field |
Next we have the same rocks, rearranged into a couple of plateaus. For the starry background, there was an overlay feature in Pixlr that I used. That required me to edit this on my laptop, however, as stars appeared across the entire photo.
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| Extrasolar Planet? |
Finally, here's one using the same technique as with the other rock shots. I stitched the rocks with a smudge tool, and added some artificial light. What I found unique in this was the look of dust rolling across the top of the plateau stone. This was an artifact from the "anti-shadow". I decided to leave that in since it made it look like dust, or some kind of vapor was rolling off the top.
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| Plateau |
Not bad for something considering it was created underneath my couch, now only if I had some dry ice...
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