My latest challenge entry...

[Aspecto5]

So I put a little effort into the current challenge that's goin on in the dgrin challenge forum. I started out with this....

http://fhoimages.smugmug.com/Professional/Thanksgiving-Lehner-Phillips/MG5269/1088536958_B7Pi6-M.jpg (http://fhoimages.smugmug.com/Professional/Thanksgiving-Lehner-Phillips/14211530_P7VxS#1088536958_B7Pi6-A-LB)

This is where it went....

http://www.fhoimages.com/Professional/Challenges/fireflys-b/1088509469_2Stuo-L.jpg (http://www.fhoimages.com/Professional/Challenges/9899000_Te7rA#1088509469_2Stuo-A-LB)

The biggest thing was the lighting effects in photoshop. I created two light sources, one for the moon, one for the moons reflection. I also put the ripple in with Distort, Zig Zag from the filter menu. Outer glowed some orange dots for the fireflies and then duplicated that layer so I could flip it and bring down the opacity. Thus, giving me a slight reflection of my little friends. I think the last thing was masking with the hues to get my sky the right color of blue.

I'm not one of those people that has a vision and nails it. I wish I could be, but it just doesn't happen like that for me. Instead, I start with something and it goes through the transformation on its own. I had no idea that this was what I was gonna end up with. Hope you like it. :dunno

[ivar]

I've moved this out of the people forum, since this is not about people :D Still cool enough to share, so 'technique' it is!

[Sam]

I like it! Good job and thanks for sharing.

Sam

[rmann]

i love the darkness in it all, the lighting is great, the only thing that nagged me was the the orange lights...i like them but maybe there were too many? sometimes less is more right?

[Qarik]

that's well done for the most part. Couple of thing though... the reflection of the moon is actually much brigther then the moon, and the position in the water is much closer to the tree line then in the actual sky. I think the ripple would work better somewhere away fromteh center as well.