ISO 1600 | 17mm | f 5.6 | 1/100 sec

Have you ever experienced an information-overload?  Where there’s so much stuff trying to cram itself inside your cranium that you can’t even think?  It’s like all those thoughts are just swirling around inside your head trying to get organized, when in reality it’s just a great big mess.

Sleep is no consolation either, because the moment you close your eyes and drift off, all those thoughts invade your dreams and run rampant all night, leaving you worn out and head-ache-ridden come morning.  If only those thoughts could be put to rest, if only the act of processing all that information wasn’t so difficult and overwhelming, if only my head would work the way it’s supposed to…

This was a really fun project for me.  It’s my first attempt at combining photography and 3D elements together.  The original photo is a composite of the background image and a picture of me sitting on the floor with a fan blowing my shirt around.  Then I used Blender to model and render all the individual papers flying around in the sky, and I also used it to composite the 3D render into the original photo.  I then jumped back into Photoshop and added some lighting effects and some additional atmosphere (dust, etc.).  All in all, it was an awesome experience to work with these different elements and merge them together into a final image, one that would have been very difficult to accomplish using only photographic techniques.

I’m finding that in order to create images that stem from your dreams, sometimes you have to take an unconventional approach, or try something that you’ve never done before.  Without the help of 3D rendering, there’s no way I could have created this image (at least not to the same degree).  I’m definitely excited to see how this tool could be used in future projects, and I’ll be experimenting a lot to discover what is really possible.  After all, if one’s goal is to capture dreams, one should expect that his methods will drift outside the realm of conventionality.  There’s really no other option…

Created another Photoshop brush for this project.  You can download it below:

Photoshop Brush – Dust