Do Not Point Camera At Mirror

I wonder if that's how he gets all those models!?

I honestly didn't expect to make a cap today.  But if I include the 'Monthly Report' that I posted on the first, then I've made a post here every day this month.  I can't recall the last time I've made five consecutive daily posts.  So while I wasn't in the most cappy of moods, I figured I would at least give it a try.

I saw that Dawn (commentator over at the Haven) was next up on my cap debt list.  As I've never capped Dawn before, I figured I had better start with her preferences.  And um... well there aren't many.  She doesn't care what male name is used.  She would like Dawn as a name, but isn't tied down to it.  She want's no males in the photo and no below the waist nudity.  And... that's about it.  At first glance that seems to be completely wide open... but those two things that she doesn't want cuts out the majority of my work.

I have done clean caps though, so I went over to fuskator and looked for images of pretty girls.  This set immediately caught my attention. At first I just wanted to enjoy the photos and wasn't even considering making a cap out of them.  It reminds me of a project I had in the first semester of photography school... take a self portrait.  Most of my classmates went home and took a picture of themselves in their bathroom mirror, but I happened to have a large (3 feet by 4 feet) mirror that I brought into the studio.  I really didn't know what I was doing with all the studio lights, but I ended up with a really interesting image of myself.

Anywho... after I looked at the photo set for a bit, I kept coming back to this particular image.  The look on her face is almost a perfect 'What the fuck...' expression that just begs for a cap.  And with the weird cropping it would make a very dynamic cap.  The idea of a magic camera of course came to mind, but I feel that it's been a little over done, so since the mirror frame was such a large part of the photo I decided to have it be a magic mirror (yeah yeah... magic mirrors are ALSO overdone, but I went there anyway).

The story came together rather easily as I just pictured a photographers loft where I worked in Chicago as the setting (his place was full of props and lights and camera equipment).  While I was working on the story, I kept going to the image and futzing around with it.  I didn't keep any of the changes (spot coloring it, desaturating it, blurring it, adding a wave/distortion patter to the reflected image...), but I did keep the idea of having the warning written down on the mirror.  Using a handwritten font (the font is called "Chickenscratch"), I made it slightly see through and then added a smudge effect.  I also added a copy of it over top of itself and moved it slightly to the left and down so that it would look like it was written on top of the mirror with a grease pencil and wiped at with someone's thumb.

It was simple at that point to rotate the text layers to line up with the edges of the mirror.   And when I went to put the text in, I decided to do the same thing, making it look as though the story is in the mirror too.  Overall I think they both give the cap a nice dynamic look that accentuates the odd crop.

I hope both Dawn and everyone else enjoy's the cap.  Oh.. and be sure to check out Dawn's caption blog "Dawn's Girly Site".  I'll be honest, I didn't know she had one so I haven't explored it to deeply.  But she does have 243 posts and only opened her blog in February of this year!