Post A Picture That Was The Most Challenging To Create

Hello Desheron, this was the most challenging for me because it's a new medium for me, very different from making copper sculptures. This image colorization of a photograph of a black and white painting by Leopld Loffler 1878 took me 16 hours of now stop work while I was learning the software to do it in as I went.

I think that this painting was the biggest challenge for me. All of dem bubbles!

More than three hours setup - more than an hour just to pass six threads in the right order through a single needle.

Took countless hours to give everyone color before making them into this whimsical piece at 12,000x4,000 pixel resolution and can be printed here from faa as large as 108x36. -W

The nature of what I do is time consuming and can't be compared to other work in that regard really. But this took me two months and change. And it's not my most time intensive work. It was hardest because of all the compositional detail I put in.

All the different elements.

Most all of my artwork is extremely time consuming as I tend to work in detail. The most difficult is animal hair. Here is one that took a long time working in the layers of a detailed drawing, then watercolor, then back to detailed drawing & pen. The next
one was a close 2nd working with the same method.


Most of my artwork takes a couple months to complete but I also have a job outside of the art which takes the time away from art.

This one was a challenge to do...A digital engraving..

My work is very detailed so it all is very time consuming. this one was a real challenge and took a couple of months. The most time consuming were the little pebbles.

This one really doesn't need much explanation, as you can all imagine the difficulty with this shot! LOL! (and the HUGE mess it created)!

This one was also very time consuming, as these were all separate elements that I merged together into one picture!

i think this colorized one took like 3-4 days


and this one took like 1.5 weeks, it has like 1400 layers on it or something like that.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

An iconic view... but an outstanding treatment as it combines several shooting and processing techniques. Photo stitching (more than 40 HDR pictures) and complex selective coloring done at pixel level... couple dozens of hours

The biggest challenge here was to paint the sheer shawl and have the dress showing through. Sort of like painting lace curtains.

Took many layers, took hours of Photoshop and created a wealth of grey hair!!!

Challenging, but fun!

The one I just finished this evening

Easily this one, I could've painted the whole thing by hand in half the time it took me to do it digitally. It was the bane of my existence for some time:


Can you find the inadvertent bunny? =)

No I can not find no darn bunny.....

This one took less time than to find Susan's bunny. But it still took five weeks. Plus some retouching over the months.
I will never be completely happy with it. 18 different images forming 18 petals. I thought it was between 15 and 20 images,
but by my count it is 12 images not including wrapping around fragments of images.

I woke up at 1:30 am this morning with old man's disease. I could not fall back to sleep. I can not
see straight this morning. I have been working since 4 am.

The color and texture of the ribbon is built up of many layers of translucent color and texture medium, with sanding between the layers. I did not keep a record of time, but it took me at least three weeks of diligent work to complete.

I don't normally have the patience to spend loads of time on a single image. This magnolia vector took quite a while to complete to my satisfaction. There are a lot of overlapping shapes, gradients and transparencies in it.

The challenge in doing night shots from a boat on the ocean is that the boat is always moving. In addition there is engine vibration. I had just replaced the zoom that came with my camera with a 16-85 VR lens for the vibration reduction. I don't use tripods or monopods on ships because they conduct vibration and do nothing to stop ship movement. Digital blue light photography is a challenge even on land. You have to get the exposure perfect, unless you are doing it HDR. When the opportunity came I practiced all night, perfecting my handholding technique and nailing the exposure so as not to blow out the highlight detail. I wanted to shoot at a low ISO to avoid noise. I finally got it down to a 1 second exposure, timing with the wave motion to get the least amount of movement. If you time it right there is a point were there is no motion once or twice per wave. Once I nailed the exposure for the lights I waited for the ambient light to come up. I got off a few soft images and one sharp but crooked one about a half hour before daybreak. Then the main engines were started and the session was over. There was almost no post processing. I just leveled it and did a slight change of the white balance. No shadow recovery or highlight recovery was needed, although years later I reprocessed it for FAA. This is my top earning image.

It's there David, I swear. In fact, once you find it you'll probably never be able to unsee it. My husband and I actually refer to that image as "Bunny Island."

Painting is a joyful process for me....except for one occasion.
I cried me a river over it.
The last thing I did to this painting was to add the turquoise on the right...it was what it needed all along and luckily, I knew when to put the brush down.
Wish it had taken as easy a time to paint it, as it did to sell it! lol

This one went through many transformations and directions

Susan,
I see a fish to the Bunny's left and an elephant covering over the Bunny's right side....a veritable animal kingdom!

Does patience count?

I stood with my tripod set up for about an hour and a half before this street cleared out long enough to get a series of exposures to make an hdr. The actual photo itself- not a high degree of difficulty - the hardest part was cloning an 'O' into the word OYSTER as is was blown out in the actual sign. Also had to contend with drunk twenty something wanting to pose for the camera lol.

Joe Burgess
www.facebook.com/jbimag3ry

These 2. I think I'm close to 1000 hours between them...... nearly endless research on the soldier to get all the pieces of armor correct and managing those peacock tail feathers nearly had me rocking back and forth in a corner while sucking my thumb.. lol :) Still haven't sold a post card of either one.....

This one was tough....

This one too, took about 5 weeks, most of it spent on the sails and rigging.. pretty much hated life all the while crafting it. :/

Just find the locals who knows where to stay, then come in dawn time and wait while the sun appears in the right place. Now just click!

all of your photos are magnificent, i c y it took so long to create.

Water from the wave action during this nor'easter in Ocean City, Maryland was washing right under my Jeep. I was on the edge of a parking lot (blacktop) so I wasn't worried about washout - just a bit about a freak huge wave that could come along at any time.





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~ Bill
~ US Pictures .com

This is one that was fairly challenging since it started out as a low resolution image and was converted into several other combined and separate formats including an OOF (Out Of Frame) image and also converted from 2D to 3D Stereo Anaglyph (requiring Red/Cyan filtered 3D glasses for viewing) via shifting pixels with a clone tool. I also eliminated most of the background bars, wires, cables, and safety apparatus. While I was at it, I created several other versions of the image for 3D Stereo crossview, and normal 2D.

Here is the 3D Stereo Anaglyph version (Requires Red/Cyan filtered 3D glasses for viewing depth)...



Here is the 3D Stereo Crossview version (Requires the entire side-by-side image to be within view and then gently converge (cross) your eyes and focus on the middle image that appears while ignoring the outside. (Not everyone is successful, but if you are, it becomes easier each time and eventually 2nd nature. No 3D glasses required).



And finally, one image showing all the different formats starting with the original unedited 2D image - "Alternate Universes - Beginning To End"...

LOL Marlene! Even though that's not really true, it's enough to make me know that you are looking at exactly the right place find my unintended bunny! Too funny! :D