I realized partway through the main image I was working on yesterday that I probably wouldn’t be able to finish that night, so I switched gears. I had a few false stars before I ended up doing a Firefly beauty shot. One little touch was moving the starboard shuttle out to launch position, so it could pick up the glint of the sunlight.
I generally like to tell a little story with my images. One of the things I’ve found myself doing (and will probably have to lean in to) during this project is doing more quotidian images. That’s probably not the worst thing; on the TV shows and movies that first made me want to get into this field, many of the shots were just establishing shots. Nothing but the camera, one subject, and some lights, communicating nothing beyond the fact that there’s a thing here, and in a moment, we’ll be seeing the people inside it.
Now, this picture was an interesting one for me to make, since I tried a few new things. The contrails were a first for me, and I’m happy with how they turned out. The heat ripples coming out of Serenity’s engines also worked well. After a little polishing in Photoshop so the rendered elements blended in with the photographed stuff, I’m ready to call it done.
Well, it had been a while since I did anything but model rigging in Layout, and once I saw Serenity, this picture just sorta popped into my head. I’d been saving the basic composition for another idea, but I decided that this was as good a use as any of the “Ship flying towards camera left over an ocean sunset” concept. Plus, it gave me a chance to try out Skytracer and a tutorial landscape and ocean plain that I hadn’t made use of yet. Anyway, here’s the picture.
