Pulling the pumper arm out of the background has been way more work than I initially thought it would be. This tiny portion of the whole image shows how much of the original background stays in the image, even after erasing the background itself. Our eyes don’t always see how much of a blue sky is reflected in what we don’t normally think of as reflective surfaces, such as the matte green paint on the metal pumper arm.
The white pipe has some brown reflection from a building behind it, but doesn’t seem to have much in the way of blue sky reflection. That’s because the darker blue sky reflection is soaked up by the lighter blue sky that will be the new background. The light blue sky isn’t the only new background for this image, though. There’s also a grass and gravel path instead of a concrete street, reservoir water, and a line of trees. Lastly, the whole pumper gets a brand new shadow underneath it.
There is still a lot of work to do on this image and it is going to be imperfect in a lot of ways. I think that’s going to make it more interesting, the imperfect bits that don’t stick out, and the bits that fit in being imperfect in their own way. This has been a really fun image to work on.
