This is by far one of the longest running personal projects I’ve done to date. Inclusive of the planning, brainstorming and procastination, it took me about 3 months to get everything together. That’s pretty long for limited attention span me. The actual editing took about 3-5 hours per element, but the lead up to that took much longer.

Anyway, before I go into the details, here’s the final image.

Click to enlarge

Poetically (or fluffily) it’s an image showing the attempted containment of the 4 natural elements, Earth, Fire, Water and Air in an artificial environment. Much like how man tries to control nature but sooner or later nature finds a way to burst out of this containment.

Realistically, it’s just an image that I stumbled upon doing by chance and somehow evolved till what you see here. It was originally only supposed to be the Earth element, but somehow I figured it would look better with all the other 3 elements together to form a set. It was also a chance for me to hone my photoshop and photographic pre-postprocessing visualisation skills and to eventually add this to my commercial portfolio.

It sounds strange that I “stumbled” upon this, because the original intention was to photograph a person and then make that person look like she’s a fairy. Okay it doesn’t make sense but my idea was to have the fairy in an aquarium like setting, aquariums being one of my personal hobbies. So along the way it morphed and morphed and I decided to just omit the fairy altogether (oops!) considering I never really liked photographing people to begin with!

Here you can see the original sketches (notice the words “fairy aquarium” in the lower left)

Over my years doing creative things, my sketchbook is by far one of the MOST important tools when it comes to the development of ideas. Drawing ideas photoshop is just not the same as scribbling down something with a good old pen and paper. Anything from websites, to logos, to even photographs have usually turned out better if I started with a sketch.

So let’s take a look at the individual elements and I’ll tell you how I did them.

If the videos don’t fire up, come back another time, been having problems with Vimeo, their videos just refuse to work for some reason! Alternatively you can try going directly to http://vimeo.com/user1445643/videos to take a look.

The Earth Element

The Earth Element was the most straight forward, requiring the least amount of photoshop work as the tree (a bonsai) and shrubs (various plants) were all literally planted into the vase. You can see the planting and eventual photographing process in the following video.

Towards the end of the video you’ll notice I used an SB800 and fired multiple images all around the vase. This was because I wanted the eventual image to look like it was lit by fireflies flying around the vase. What this required was for me to then photograph different areas of the vase with the SB800 so that it looks like there are multiple sources of light.

So the eventual images I got were something like this.

Here’s a video showing how I combined these images into one.

The eventual image looks like this

The flowers were actually glued onto the bonsai, some other flowers and shrubs were sourced from the local landscaping shops. The gravel was sourced from an aquarium shop which happened to sell really tiny bags of gravel (I was worried I needed to buy 5kgs to use 50grams!).

Yup, so that’s the Earth Element, now lets move on to the next.

The Fire Element

The Fire Element was the next one I did. I resued the gravel from the Earth Element to form a base for the charcoal that would be laid over it. I then fired up some of them in my studio’s back yard area (to avoid carbon monoxide poisioning!), and then transferred them over into the vase to be photographed.

Please note that I did have a fire extinguisher on hand in case something went wrong.

Here’s the BBQ shot setup

The eventual series of photos looked like this

What I didn’t account for was that the heat would crack the vase! You can see from the above image where the vase cracked across the bottom. Thankfully the other two elements didn’t really need a physical vase to be present.

Anyway, sure the fire is pretty, but it wasn’t enough. That’s when photoshop comes to work again.

Here’s the video showing how I edited the Fire Element photograph. Notice in the middle how I had to try out different “flame shapes” before landing on one that I liked.

Here’s the final image of the Fire Element.

Overall pretty pleased with how this turned out! Not too shabby considering it’s the first time I had to digitally paint flames.

The Water Element

This was actually the last element that I worked on, but I’ll tell you how it was done first since it’s in sequence in the final combined image. This shot is by far the crowd favourite, probably because because of the splashing or maybe it’s the corals. Well doesn’t matter, the final photograph comprised of two main components. The first being the rocks and corals to make it look like an aquarium of sorts, the second being the water splashes in order for the element to be the same height as the others.

To clear things up, no corals were harmed in the shoot. The corals and rocks were photographed from my friend’s aquarium and then pieced together in photoshop. The splashes were photographed in studio using a simple SB800 setup.

Here’s the video showing how I shot the splashes.

Here’s the original photo of the empty cracked vase

Here’s the video showing the editing process and how I composited all the images together.

Here’s the final image.

As mentioned, this is the crowd favourite and probably my favourite too. My only gripe is the scale of things. The corals are a little too small in comparison with the water droplets and the objects in the other vases. Still, it makes for a good image.

The Air Element

This was the most tricky element for me, simply because it’s not possible to photograph air. Smoke yes, but air no. So I downloaded some references of twisters/tornadoes and figured out roughly how to digitally paint one into the vase.

I started with the same cracked vase as the Water Element

Here’s how I digitally painted the “air” into the vase

Here’s the final image

This I would think is the least successful of the 4 elements, I believe it’s because my digital painting skills are still not good enough to do a fully convincing painting just yet. But once it’s placed with the other 3 elements, I think it still looks decent and the idea is still brought across, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Another hour or so of photoshop and the 4 elements were combined.

Click to enlarge

Yup! So that’s how much work went into creating this image, hopefully it’ll look good in my portfolio and open up more doors for me in my work!