Steveo - 2012

[StevoDigital]

Hi. I'm new to this forum and this is both my first post and competition entry. I've been following the forum for the last couple of months and it's inspirational stuff. Apologies for not posting any work in progress before now. I'm looking forward to participating regularly in the forum from now on.

Theme
Wikipedia said that Armageddon is the time when God reigns down fireballs during a showdown with the dark forces. Whilst this type of image has been done many times before, I decided to go with it and concentrate on producing the very best version possible.

My image is a roof level view of London at dusk time, during a meteor storm. Early meteor strikes have already caused destruction and started fires which have created smoke which is beginning to thicken in the sky. In the current economic climate there's unlikely to be any new landmark buildings by 2012 so I've based it on the current skyline.

Photo Ref
The main photo references are two dusk shots of London taken by myself from the members gallery of the Tate Modern Gallery. I rearranged the placement of many of the buildings both to improve the composition and to bring St Pauls closer to the NatWest Tower in the city.

For the destruction I used a collection of imagery from internet image libraries which allow reuse, such as 3dTotal.com. Most of the fire and explosions came from video stills from a video clip library DVD.

Composition
I like to keep my compositions as simple and as dramatic as possible. This image was quite challenging as the buildings and meteors presented many competing points of interest. I really started making progress when I started introducing heavy smoke which let me sculpt the composition.

I also like to emphasize the depth in my images, introducing extreme foreground elements in the form of the semi destroyed structure of a high rise building, and buildings in the far distance.

Initial sketch and photo refs:
(WIP and final image to follow)

[StevoDigital]

Here is the WIP for my final image uploaded earlier to the main competition thread.

[StevoDigital]

Here is a link to a high res 4k version of the final image:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3802510/Stev...Full%20Res.jpg

[atulkatdare]

@StevoDigital, welcum n thnx 4 posting...
liked ur work, nice piece of composition, color correction n lovely matte,
just an opinion, it could hv looked much better if u wd nt hv used the destroyed building in front, though its a good camera angle...
plz take it as suggestion, plz tk no offence,
its gr8 2 see u participating, good luck n happy new year!

[StevoDigital]

atulkatdare, thanks for your feedback. All comments gratefully received.

[raulfabi]

Hi Stevo and welcome.

Some words about your image:

-first of all in my opinion your destroyed window(door) frame is not helping your image.It is atracting too much the eye.just my opinion.

-second, at such amount of asteroids(meteors) the destruction and the shockwave should be massive.

[BBB]

Hi Stevo, i think it should be better with other aspect ratio, a panoramic ratio in this image will look better. And i think that maybe there are too much foreground objects (the foreground takes about 1/5-1/6 of the image)

[atulkatdare]

Originally Posted by BBB

Hi Stevo, i think it should be better with other aspect ratio, a panoramic ratio in this image will look better. And i think that maybe there are too much foreground objects (the foreground takes about 1/5-1/6 of the image)

dats exactly wat i wanted 2 say, thnx BBB, ur comment is really helpful..
but 1 thing StevoDigital, i really loved da way u hv shown da destruction here...nice, keep it up!