For awhile now I have been wanting to try some ideas I have and
start experimenting in a photographic art direction with my photography.
Very recently, I happened to watch an internet workshop on fine art photography
and this was the nudge I needed to put some ideas into planning and action!

Here is one of my first results from a little shoot I did yesterday,
I call this picture: “Wisteria Princess”

I love using photography and the effects that I can create in Photoshop as tools to create a completely new image.

The above image is a composite.
I knew what image I wanted to create and then used what I had to create it.
For the background,  I started off photographing my neighbors blooming wisteria.

since I wanted a fairly symmetrical type of picture and wanted lots of blooms in the picture,
I altered the image in CS5 to get this:

and I knew I wanted my image to be square and to give the impression of a big pond in the front of the image
so duplicated the layer, increased my canvas size and flipped one of the layers to give a mirror image on the bottom.
This I saved as PSD file so that I could keep the image as two halves on two separate layers.
And this was the base that I used for the background of my finished image:

I had the background done up to here before even photographing my subject.
This way I knew before I got her in the studio exactly where I would be placing her and how I wanted her reflection to be.

In the studio, I set up so that I would be able to easily cut her out from the background.
I also put Plexi Glas down on top of a black sheet in order to get a nice reflection.
On the way to the studio, I grabbed a few of the blooming wisteria for putting in her hair
and I used a petticoat that I had in my closet because I wanted her to have a bit of a romantic look to her.
This was the straight out of camera shot I got of my model in the studio:

After having both my subject and background, I could start combining them and work on editing them together.

Wisteria Princess

I have a couple of other poses from this little shoot that I plan on editing yet.