Those Magical Summer Nights

Well, sort of. Believe it or not, this image wasn't actually taken at night.

It was a hot and muggy, cloudy afternoon, and with 4 days worth of rain, we hadn't had a chance to cut the grass in just over a week. Because the grass had gotten so high, little white clovers had sprouted up all over the place, and I felt inspired to use them somehow. My daughter had a lacy, cream colored dress that she wore only once on Easter, so what better time to reuse it than for a nice photo in the field of clovers? But then I got a different idea...

What if I attempted to make it look like nighttime? I had never done something like that before, but I was up for the challenge.

I grabbed an empty mason jar (luckily we have about 30 since we actually use them as drinking glasses) and we went outside. I asked my daughter to stand in the clovers and imagine that she was holding a jar full of twinkling fireflies. This was the result...

I started by lowering the image's exposure, so that it was fairly dark, and brought down the saturation, so it wasn't too vibrant. I then replaced the background with a dark, wooded scene and added the subtle glow of the moon shining through. I finished it up by painting in the fireflies and adding a cooling filter. Not bad for my first attempt at a composite like this, but I'm definitely looking forward to practicing more in the near future.

Overall, I'm really hoping that this image will remain special to my daughter, especially because catching a firefly before bed is part of our summertime nightly routine. Thanks for reading!

Credit for the direct stock links can be found below:

Trees: https://pixabay.com/en/dawn-dusk-fog-landscape-mist-1868885/

Moon: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Moon-Sky-Stock-661770316