Simone's Selfies

Old School Selfies at that!

I had the desire to cap last night, but just couldn't get anything going.  I even tried to go 'old school' and just look at people's haven preferences to see if I could get a story idea going.  Nothing.  So instead of frustrating myself further I just went to bed and figured this would be another no cap weekend.

This morning I briefly considered trying to find either a pic or a set of preferences to get my capping motor running, but tossed the idea aside figuring I didn't want both the creative itch and the frustration of not being able to scratch it.  While doing my normal mid morning internet browsing, I saw Miss Simone pop up in YIM and started chatting with her.  It seems that she was going through her saved images and trying to make a cap herself.  Just hearing that made me think of a story.... a man that has too many images to cap so a couple capping friends change him into a girl and will only change him back once he's cleared out his que.  Of course as in most caps, the newly transformed woman falls further into her self and just starts making images of herself to cap instead of finishing off the old saved photos.

I even had the idea of what type of image I wanted.  I figured this would work perfectly with a photo of a woman taking her own self portrait.  All I needed was a woman pointing a camera straight at the viewer or at least looking longingly at a mirror while holding a camera.

While searching for that image I came upon this one:

It wasn't what I had in mind, but this would work wonderfully.  I found out that this is a photo of Miranda Cosgrove (an actress and singer songwriter that I haven't heard of) and I briefly considered filling up all the polaroids with pictures of her... but that felt like it would just take an extra amount of time for very little reward.  Instead I went right into writing.

I didn't want to clutter up the basic fun idea so I just laid up the premise then knocked it down with the punchline.  The only thing that really changed was making it fit to the photo (adding in the polaroid slant) and adding Dee and myself into the story.  Hey... if you can't include yourself and your friends in a cap then you just aren't doing it right!

After writing the story I had the title "Simone's Selfie Caps" picked out... I just needed to know where to put it and how to lay the text over the photo.  Obviously the text would go to the left of the girl... but with only two paragraphs I couldn't overlay the entire left side.  I thought about whipping up a quick Simone styled cap that included a photo of Miranda, but realized that a cap wouldn't quite fit anywhere in this style of photo.  The thought just popped into my head of having Simone in her own Polaroid.. that would let me 'write' the title at the bottom.  Thankfully I've used Polaroids enough that I have one saved back as a Photoshop file ready to be pulled out and used.  Here's my first attempt:

I liked it.. but it obviously needed a bit of work.  So I added a shadow to it.  Adding the shadow was a bit of a pain as since it's 'hollow' the shadow came through the inside of the Polaroid completely ruining the photo over a photo vibe I was going for:

To get rid of the inner shadow I had to make another copy of the polaroid without the shadow, then cut away the inside of the shadowed layer enough so that the shadow would fall completely under the final layer.  Satisfied now that it looked like a photo laying over another photo I started to add some dynmic elements to it.  I added that 'Caitlyn Twist' that I love...

...made a copy of the original photo, cut out the area inside of the Polaroid, and made the original black and white...

...oversaturated the color portion and added the new title...

...change the title to blue and gave it a slight blur to mimic a 'pen on polaroid' effect....

And finally added in the two paragraphs of story and added my watermark!

Voila... a quickie cap that I think is quite fun.  I'd normally end a post by hoping that the recipient likes the cap, but as Simone was still online when I posted it to the Haven, I've already seen that she did enjoy it.  So I guess I'll just end by hoping that everyone else gets a kick out of it!

Love,
C