It's a weird thing making images the way I do. It's sort of like an illustrator - you make something out of nothing. Very little of what I do is "observational" photography. In fact, little of it is actually photographing anything the way it is - instead I just use pieces of the real world to construct a different one. So it's like the way an illustrator would work, but instead of having the ability to draw something any way you see it I'm limited to the mimetic nature of photography - I can only photograph real things, and then construct them into something new. It's sometimes seems as limiting as it is limitless...
I get into trouble when I fuss too much. I'm like a teenage girl waiting for her prom date - he's running late so she fusses and fusses with her makeup and hair and by the time he shows up she looks like a scary clown. There's really no point while retouching where I really solidly go "ok, it's done". It's so easy to lose perspective when you put hours into an image... I imagine it's similar to a painter putting layers of oil on a canvas... at what point do you stop correcting yourself? painting over, etc. It's even harder with photoshop because you can literally edit forever... so when do you stop?
This is a shot I had worked on a while back... after sitting on it for a while I just didn't think the final image lived up to my expectations so I went back and did a re-edit. In doing so I found some screenshots that I must have taken during the original process. I think it's kind of interesting to see how these things develop so I decided to share the process a bit here. The final version is at the top of this post and the working images are in order of the working process.
