Week 27: Photo manipulation

When I started this blog, the intention was to only post photos, but as I have been learning and growing I found myself more interested in what is called photo manipulation. That is not to say that I won't be taking photos and enjoying them just for themselves any more, just that my horizon's have broadened and when I feel the desire to create an image that I cannot setup in the real world for whatever reason I now have other options.

This one has a bit of history behind it. I've been doing a couple of photo manipulation tutorials. One of them had you create a beautiful background with arches through which you could see storm clouds and then in the foreground was a woman with her hands raised to the sky. Now I like the background, but the woman did very little for me so I decided to find a substitute. The same tutorial alter on had a small urn with water flowing out of it, which inspired me to play with filling the floor level with water just to see, but then that triggered the question, why would the building be filled with water? And the answer is off course the broom with its bucket. 

For those of you who don't understand this at all, have a look at Disney's 'The Magician's Apprentice'. Its a lovely little story about an apprentice who had to do all the chores, including carrying buckets of water to fill up a tub. The magician was not around and the apprentice thought it was unfair that he had to do this if they could just use magic, so he took the magician's hat and want and magicked a broom to carry the buckets. Unfortunately once the broom started, the apprentice could not make it stop and it kept carrying buckets of water and pouring them out into the tub. The tub could off course only take so much and eventually the whole building was flooded. Various things happened, but in the end the magician came back and fixed it all and the apprentice was back to carrying buckets of water himself. Very cute and worth watching!

Back to my photo, I created this broom with its bucket, but I just could not make it work with the arched background of my tutorial. But it was too much fun to just relegate to a corner of my hard drive, and so I went out looking for a background to suit it.

I mostly used photos by other people who have provided those images as free to use stock photos or under the Creative Commons licence and so everything you here has been derived from the photo's (and links) below.

* Broom by 1024greenstreet

* Bucket by Katie Cordrey

* Stairs - PirateLotus-Stock (on deviant art) <a href="http://piratelotus-stock.deviantart.com/art/Stairs-stock-139642387" rel="nofollow">piratelotus-stock.deviantart.com/art/Stairs-stock-139642387</a>

* Texture for red carpet by tassie.sim

* Winged Lion - my own photo
* Wood grain texture - my own photo

* Fire and water brushes - Obsidian Dawn (on deviant art)  <a href="http://redheadstock.deviantart.com/art/Flames-Fire-Photoshop-Brushes-17721488?q=boost:popular+fire+brushes&qo=0" rel="nofollow">redheadstock.deviantart.com/art/Flames-Fire-Photoshop-Bru...</a> and <a href="http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&global=1&q=water+brushes#/dm8agx" rel="nofollow">browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&global=1&...</a>

I hope this has made at least one person smile.