Aquarius | The Water Bearer

Aquarius | The Water Bearer, a photo by speckled_beckle on Flickr.

I should have started this series off with either Aries or Capricorn --since Aries is what the Zodiac calendar starts with and Capricorn is what the Greco-Roman calendar starts with-- but I just now thought of that.

So oh well.
Aquarius comes first alphabetically.
...at least that's the logic that I'm claiming.
It has nothing to do with the props we had available at the time, alright? =)

This is one of the shots out of my head from the zodiac shoot.
There are several versions of each sign swimming around in my head, and I don't know when (or if) I'll ever get them all out and into the camera.

I will surely try, though.

The ideas exist on paper, if that counts for anything! =P

This photo has a different editing style for me.
Very muted colors, almost a desaturation gradient as it goes down the photo. It almost (!) looks like I used a fancy-shmancy preset or Photoshop action on this photo. The only thing I did in Photoshop was a bit of hair fly-away touch up (since Lightroom's clone stamp tool is mediocre and good really only for skin touch ups) and add in the watermark.
I used MCP Action's "Remember When" preset in Lightroom, but then I played around with individual color saturation sliders and this is what you get.

And, if you came over from Flickr, you may remember that I mentioned that every photo so far from this series has taken on a different voice -- Libra, for example, is black and white, but I didn't just hit the "grayscale" button or pull the saturation all the way back. I like that each photo has taken on a different voice in post-processing; each sign is different, so why shouldn't each photo be?
It's almost like having several mini photo sessions to edit. When I first got Lightroom and was building up my own personalized collection of presets, each photo session that I shot created its own preset, not by intention, but just the way that each session had its own personality, voice, and environment / condition.
Most of the shoots that I've done since have not really allowed for much in the way of creativity when it comes to editing; I may go overboard-crazy with editing someone's family session, but if I am not 100% happy with the result, no one else will see it. (Chances are, the photo will be either color or monotone, not appearing to be half and half like this photo seems to be doing.)
An artistic session like this one got the ball rolling again.
So, in a way, this series is nostalgic for me, taking me back.

There are several other shots coming from this; I might just blog them instead of Flickr them. We'll see. Or maybe I'll just Facebook them. It's 3am; please forgive me if my brain is all over the place!

Also, one final word about this photo: I am not crazy about my water mark. Any feedback on that would be great. (And any feedback on the photo / concept would be great, too.)