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Scouting for Campsite

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Description

Made for "Let it Snow" contest [link]

Took me more than 5 hours to complete the manipulation.
But, I did it . Finally. Had to turn a normal and spring-ish photo into a snow blizzard. The idea is to show soldiers searching for a safe campsite in a snow storm,or blizzard (whatever you wanna call it), and stumbles upon a ruined old castle. :p

All thanks goes to the providers of the awesome stock images. Never could have done it without your help :)
Stocks Used
Landscape by *Burtn : [link]
Ruined Castle by *GothicBohemianStock : [link]
Tree by ~Houchi : [link]
Soldier 1 by *Tasastock : [link]
Soldier 2 by *Tasastock : [link]
Image size
2992x1986px 9.22 MB
Comments8
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Urus-28's avatar
:star::star::star-half::star-empty::star-empty: Overall
:star::star::star::star::star-empty: Vision
:star::star::star::star-empty::star-empty: Originality
:star::star-half::star-empty::star-empty::star-empty: Technique
:star::star::star-empty::star-empty::star-empty: Impact

The idea of riders searching for a place nicely appear in your picture. This is due to the choice of the foreground rider and to the general unwelcoming place.
The universe where is the picture take place is classic but the idea is not so common in picture because it does not give a strong impact, after all they are just searching.
The composition is quite good my sight go well in the picture, seeing a valley with mountains, a rider in the foreground and what seems to be a castle or cathedral ruin.

And here start the problems.
A castle but placed on what seems to be trees which seems to be very close to the rider, perhaps a dwarf caste on a tree ? Your signature at the root of the tree is giving the idea that's a part of the picture, at first sight I was thinking to some kind of billboard.
I've said dwarf castle, this idea comes from the second rider, in the picture it's placed higher, so in perspective it means it's farer than your castle tree. And since you can easily figure the size of a horse the castle take also a size... I would say no more than 4 meters high... Very small for such architecture.
So you have to work your perspective.

Do you see many snow storm under blue sky ? Well I never seen something like this... With snow the sky is grey and give a poor light with low contrast a few shadows.
So with a beautiful blue sky and strong shadows on the rocks well the idea of snow just fail. At first sight I was thinking to some IR photography experiment and stars in the sky.
The strong shadows of the ground also create a problem with the rider in the foreground, it seems to not have any shadow.
Create a snow storm environment from a spring picture is extremely challenging, I know you can't find easily the stock you're looking for. But try to find reference pictures for the environment you want to create, just to evaluate how the global light can be, how the snow is visible on the ground and mountains. At the end perhaps you will discover that you have to paint a large part of your photography to reach the expected level, not everything is possible with filters...

I salute the challenge of this picture, I would have probably fail too on the snow aspect.
Try harder, I'm sure you will succeed.