Project 52 – Week 12 – “The House On Keller Hill”

Apparently, my seasons are off. My last post was something that looked like it should have been done around Halloween. This one looks like the dead of winter!

I thought I might give you a quick tour of the main parts that created this composition. Let’s start with the house.

The house in this one is my family home where my father was raised in Friendship, NY. The house stood on Keller Hill (my grandmother was a Keller). I only have seen a few pictures of it because my grandparents moved to Virginia before I was born. The picture is actually a scan of a picture that was about 2×3 in so it was tiny. I had to use Gigapixel by Topaz Labs to increase the size a little bit so I could work with it without it getting pixelated.

I wanted the composition to be a bit more than just a picture of the house so I needed a background. I knew I wanted a snowy scene but I didn’t have any suitable shots of snowy landscapes. Time to get creative. I was planning for this to be a night time composition in the moonlight so I was actually able to use a sandy beach shot I had! I believe this is a small dune that I shot at South Padre Island in Texas but I’m not totally sure.

Next, we have the moon. I used to shoot the moon a lot. It’s actually easy to do once you know the secret. Everyone who tries to shoot a pic of the moon sets the camera for a nighttime shot, which on the surface makes perfect sense. But it will never work. You see, when you set the camera for a nighttime shot and aim it at the moon, the camera tries to make the sky brighter because that is what night mode does. It tries to make the dark things brighter. Consequently, it blows out the exposure on the moon and you have a dark blue sky with a blown-out light blob.

To successfully shoot the moon you have to set the camera to daylight/sunny day mode. I know this is counter-intuitive but it works, as you can see.

Finally, there is the hiker. I didn’t have a picture of a hiker so I just had to get it from a stock photo web site..

And there you have it! I painted in the extra trees, but the rest is just photoshop composite magic!