This months photo was fairly complicated.  But hey, how often do you get to test an idea, and have willing models?  So here's the sequnce...

• First I shot Patty in the studio, basically against a green screen.  I then extracted her from background.
• Then I added a new background, a shot taken at Jug Mountain Ranch Golf Course.  Just happens that's where Patty works in the summer.  She's an avid golfer and strong supporter of Breast Cancer Awareness Month - hence her pick of October.
• Then I photographed a wine glass exploding.  But here's the secret part (well not now).  I printed a 13 x 19 photo of Patty with the golf course background.  I then mounted the print on foam board and put a real glass of wine in front of the photo, just where I wanted it to be in the photo.  Then I got a shot of the wine glass exploding.  The camera was looking straight into the wine glass and photo.  See my previous blog on exploding wine glasses here - http://www.ertter.com/blog/post/2009/04/Exploding-Wine-Glass.aspx
• Next I extracted the exploding wine glass, wine, and pieces from the new shot.
• Back in Photoshop I placed the new image of the extracted wine glass over the original Patty/Golf Course image.  The reason for all this was I wanted to have the original resolution of Patty & the Golf Course, and I wanted a high resolution stop action shot of the wine glass, wine & flying pieces.  But really important - I wanted the transparency of the wine glass & flying pieces to be correct.  Do you see that now?
• The next step was to add in the golf ball, and that was basically working one in very carefully.
• And finally, Patty wanted the pink ribbon, so I added that in.

So it took several hours, several layers, and some broken wine glasses (not to mention wine on my garage floor).

By the way, her wine was Greg Norman Wines from Australia.

I haven’t posted anything lately because I haven’t done much other than work on the Bistro 45’s fund raiser calendar.  The weather has been bad, my knee still hurts and I just haven’t been motivated to get out much.

But I will touch on the Bistro calendar.  The calendar is a fund raiser for the Kit Worthington Foundation, which donates funds to the musical arts.  Donations over the past year included a musical scholarship and donations to the music festival in Roseberry.  This is third edition of the calendar, which should be out the first of May.  The calendar’s theme is based on wine, one wine for each month.  That’s why the Bistro 45 sponsors it.  Each month also has an employee (or more) doing something based on the wines label.  The photo I’ve posted here is for a wine call Sleight of Hand.  The label shows a magician with smoke and wine.  So we went a step further and had the magician, his pretty assistant and the levitated volunteer.  This was a fun shot to work on, as there are actually 4 images here – the levitated volunteer (Teran), the assistant & magician (Laura & Dustin), the smoke and the wine. 

Time spent on this image?  1 to 2 hours in the studio and 2 to 3 hours on the computer.  Do this for 12 images and it starts to add up.  And it’s all donated.

I’ll post some more calendar shots later – there are some fun ones, and one that took about 6 hours of Photoshop time.