Study Group 34
Candy Childrey

July

'Ready To Roll'

This is an old church bus that was abandoned in a field and backed into the bushes. First I had to reconstruct it and remove all the garbage in the windows and along the side and remove the limbs on the bus. That was done with a lot of cloning and transforming parts of the bus from a second identical image and moving parts into the image to be used. Once that was completed, poster edges was added, then accented edges and ink outlines from the filter menu. All of these filters were added and the opacity reduced. Finally the cutout filter was used only on the bus with a selection of the bus and the opacity reduced. The color was adjusted to make the grass less bright and the green of the bus was changed to a bluer color to give more contrast between the bus and grass. Selective color and color balance were used with the bus selected. After the blue was the right color then the red on the bus had to be adjusted. Then the image was cropped along the bottom. Next the image was cropped to increase the canvas on the left side. I used the free transform to fill the blank cropped area with grass and trees. I took a church from another image and reduced its size with free transform, then added a watercolor filter and burned it to make it look old and dark. Then I moved it into the image with the bus and added grass around the bottom. Finally a lot of burning was used to make the trees darker and the sky was cloned out. A slight crop across the top finished it out.

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COMMENTS:

Steve Estill	You've done a lot of work to get this image. The parts imported from the second bus and the cloning have been very skillfully done. Addition of the church is a good idea - it gives the image a story and actually makes you look at the bus. I think new tyres would be in order before it's truly 'ready to roll'.
Candy Childrey
Phil Coleman	Well done.  I like the addition of the church.  How does the image look when printed?
Semi Ayatar
Avis Davidson
Georgianne Giese
Leif Alveen	Very nice job reconstructing the bus, that must have taken a lot of time to get right. Also I have a thing for derelict items and buildings so spot on in that department. I would probably have done one of two things, however. Either I would have left the church out of the picture, or I would have increased it in size and prominence. Why? As the picture stands the church is way too small to be seen as a church, in fact I could easily have seen it as an outdoor oven for smoking fish or even a doghouse. Is it important for us to know that the bus has been a church bus at some point in time? I don't think so.

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Member Bio

Candy Childrey - Biography Born in Atlanta, Georgia, I am a southerner at heart.  My roots are in the south, but I traveled frequently as a child with my family as my Dad was in the U.S. Air Force.  Now I live in the sub tropics in Coral Springs, Florida (the Ft. Lauderdale area).  My true love is South Florida’s beautiful birds-both year round residents and our winter visitors.  One can get completely lost from the stresses of life while observing them.  I’m also very interested in the protection of our endangered species.  Not to worry though, my photography traverses all fields.  I’m a very eclectic photographer and take images of almost anything that comes my way.  One of my favorites, of course, is nature, but old broken down vehicles are also some of my favorite subjects. My camera equipment is Olympus, and I use Microsoft XP with Photoshop as my editing medium.  I enjoy using an image and working it to see how it can be altered or improved.