(click for original)
Self Portrait
I like to daydream. Sometimes I find myself looking up into the sky wondering what it’d be like to be above everything, relaxing in the clouds. At first I wanted to make an image with things I liked randomly placed, but the first image I tried didn’t look right and I wanted to do something different. We sleep for about a third of the time we’re alive, so I wanted to incorporate dreams into my portrait. This image is close to a recurring dream I’ve had; I used to think I wasn’t creative, but my strange and vivid dreams might indicate otherwise, and I think I just haven’t had a chance to express that side of myself often.
A lot of the time I spent on this was trying to get the lighting, shadows, color, and focus of each part right. I cut myself out of a previous image I took using quick mask, combined two images of clouds to create the cloud floor and sky, and added the other objects. I added a lens flare from the moon because I liked the way it looked.