Logs Upon Water Abstraction

I have always enjoyed making abstract images. Taking something that makes sense; twisting, twirling, contorting, and stretching the bounds of believability then working to reconstitute the results back in to a semi-believable shape fascinates me.

It was during Spring quarter of 2007, in my Photoshop 3 class at Lake Washington Technical College, (LWTC) that I was assigned the task of creating an abstract image for my final project. As you may imagine, I was pleased with the challenge being presented.

I scoured the net looking for a base image to start from. As I recall, it took time to find a good image for this purpose. Ultimately, I happened across Ian Parker's photograph "Owachomo natural bridge and log mirror" which he had taken in 2006 at Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah. The foreground log seemed to float upon air, and to this day I'm not exactly certain as to how it did so without being first manipulated.

Grasping upon my interest of the floating log, I begun to create a structure attached to it stretching out in to the perspective. This was accomplished by selecting and duplicating aspects of the initial log and fitting them to each other, scaling them down with each new duplication; erasing and deleting portions of the new structure as I went along to keep it from appearing to repeat too much.

Next, I removed the sky and implanted a new one to open up the space and balance the "weight" of the piece towards the bottom of the image: the foreground log. After that, I used a variety of tools and layer modes to smooth out the surface of the logs. I felt doing so would help to soften the natural grain and help to make the veined crevices of the wood pop out.

A single shadow was present already from the initial log, so the next step was to create the shadowing under my newly created log structure. This was easily accomplished by way of painting black onto an empty layer, Gaussian Blur, then altering the blending mode and opacity. I could have used the layer styles to generate a drop shadow, but then I couldn't have smudged and liquefied the black to flow with the water.

Finally, I went through and globally enhanced the Color Balance, bumped up Saturation, and refined the Levels. This of course was after giving the farthest bit of the log a slight blur to enhance the distancing.

Again, I would like to thank the photographer, Ian Parker, for taking such a splendid picture. If you get the chance, check out his work at Evanescent Light.