Where it started and where it ended

The other day I showed you this image.

If you know me you know this is not how the image started.

I like to play around with my images, which is not surprising to anyone, but I did something with this that I haven’t done before. I wanted to resituate the image. Well if that is the right way to put it.

I hinted to someone that I would talk about what I did, and while I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about it, I think I will share what I did in a basic way.

To start with, let’s have a look at the original image.

I think we can all agree the final image doesn’t look much like this.

I was following a guy on Instagram that used to take photos of buildings and then sort of change their backgrounds. I loved it and always wanted to do similar.

When I first saw this building in Queenstown I knew I wanted to try and do something different with it.

The idea was to change the background. I think the area around the building is messy and I wanted to make sure the focus was on the old theatre.

The problem then was where to find a background that worked with it. Also, something where the sun was coming from the same direction. Perhaps not exactly the same, but similar.

I decided to look at some photos I took just after leaving Coober Pedy back in 2022 and found this one.

It is a sunrise image and there is no sun, but I was hoping that wouldn’t matter.

However, my major problem was that the foreground didn’t really work, so I zoomed into it a lot and moved the horizon down.

So this became the background.

All I had to do then was put it with the building.

I also changed the colours so that the building looked like it could belong with that background. I also added the shadow on the right of the building so it worked with the sun.

One thing I wasn’t keen on was the small amount of space at the front. So I used the crop too to make the image size larger and then activated the AI generative fill to make the white space part of the image.

I also had to put in the road. That didn’t work so well.

Like I said I didn’t like the road in front so I ended up cropping it so it wasn’t so prominent.

If you remember the original image you will also remember that the sky was different. In the end I didn’t like the very pink sky. Can’t remember why, but I decided to put a blue sky with some clouds in it. I think it worked best.

So we got this as a final image.

I had hoped that the background would blend in more and not look like part of the desert.

Overall I was pretty happy with how it came out. Are there things that could be improved, absolutely, but as a first time doing this, not bad. I’m sure if I keep trying to do this sort of thing they will get better. That is the hope anyway.

I like to change the world around me. I can’t do it in any real sense, but I can do it with images. So that is what I’m trying to do more these days.

I am going to leave you with a gallery to flick through each one so you can, hopefully, see the progression more.