Left Behind
on this journey called life,
navigate the torrent of the river of time,
a glance back as memory dissolves in the water,
faces, places, feelings are left behind,
Sometimes we choose to let go,
other times life snatches us away without warning,
many sink others resist,
staying afloat only to be contemplated,
for a small spark is enough to revive a moment...
I started with a photo of the pool measuring 8000 x 6000px, which was a suitable size that I could reduce as I wished and still have a good size. Using the rectangular frame tool, I selected and removed the background, leaving only the water.
I dragged the landscape photo, positioned it under the water layer, and placed it so that the dark sky would be in the background above the water.I created a new layer and used the rectangular marquee tool to make a square and filled it with black. Then, using the free transform tool, I rotated the square to form a kind of diamond shape, using the canvas guides to keep the shape centered.
I included the photo of the eye and cropped it, then used the eraser tool to blur the edges of the photo to blend it into the diamond shape.
With the photos of the hands, I used subject selection and applied a clipping mask to remove the background, then positioned them in the water and cut them to create a sinking effect.
I cropped the canvas to make the images more centered and grouped, resulting in an image of 5664 x 4759px.
Then I got to my favorite part of the work, which is adding textures and playing with the tones of the images. First, I added the photo of the dry leaf and began to add layer blending modes, experimenting with different blending modes and duplicating layers. I did this process separately for the water and sky layers to obtain different textures. I also brought the layers of the eye, diamond, and hands holding it to the front so that they would not be affected by these blending changes.
I added additional texture with the photo of the broken screen by taking segments of it and making blending changes to the hands holding the diamond and the sky.
As a final touch, I duplicated the diamond, changed its color to white, resized it so that it would fit on the edges of the original diamond, applied the liquify filter to achieve that liquid effect, and made a layer blending change, resulting in that gray color.
To finish, I combined all the layers and enhanced the colors by applying a color query.
I took these photos with my smartphone:
A hot spring pool in my city.
View of my city on an afternoon hike.
Just my eye healing from conjunctivitis.
I photographed my hands while I was doing this work.
The broken screen of a mini laptop. I knew this photo would come in useful.
The dry leaf of an almond tree.