Wind Waker, Butterfly Slayer

Since we went with Sega instead of Nintendo, I actually never played The Legend of Zelda when I was a kid. I do enjoy long fantasy games though - the exploration, combat, and collecting random odds and ends and treasure. I finished The Phantom Hourglass on my Nintendo DS a couple years back. Spirit Tracks is still on my shelf somewhere.

Link will probably be my figure of choice for random toy shots in wooded parks. His whimsical nature is a perfect fit for the sylvan environment. This shot was done in my front yard. I only needed to use the Healing Brush to erase the display stand.

The butterflies were from a couple of shots taken at Shoreline Lake. I knew all those bug photos would eventually come in handy. Thru a fairly lengthy technique, I combined them with a torch photo I took at Coyote Ranch.

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Saving Private Carmine

Gears of War is a fun shooting game for the Xbox 360. Although not the first to introduce it, the game mechanics were so popular they were put in many shooting games from then on.

Here, Marcus Fenix is helping Clayton Carmine, one of the last surviving Carmine brothers, scale an ocean cliff. The first two brothers died in each of the first two games in the series - Anthony was head shot by a sniper and Benjamin was eviscerated by a parasite. The developers held a fan poll to see if the remaining brother would survive the final game in the trilogy - he did.

I went to the park and took a close-up shot of the figures on a large rock. Since I blew out the background to get the soldiers properly exposed, it was a simple deal to create a layer mask on the part I wanted to keep - the soldiers and the foreground rock.

I combined the above image with a shot of the waves at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, which I took during the summer. Because of the gray murkiness of the water, I adjusted the color balance, clarity, and vibrance to make the the ocean look blue without making the rocks and pebbles appear unnatural.

Direct link - https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bwxl1QbH6hwVUFRwZms1Xzh0Nzg

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