A few days ago, I published a photo featuring Pastel Moon as Elsa from Frozen. Prior to meeting her in person at this particular event, I had never met her or even heard of her before. This is also a location that I had never been to until this very day. As a photographer in the convention scene, resourcefulness of the moment can seriously make or break the quality of a photo shoot.

Having a strong history in making "fire" photos, and seeing an Elsa cosplayer, the idea instantly popped into my head to attempt an "ice" photo. We had discussed this idea a bit, and then set out to find a decent location.

Our first stop was an open field. We took some shots in that area (this article will be updated when those are finished and published). Brian Ewell was with us at the time, and suggested heading over to this large structure about a hundred yards away from where we were at, just across the field.

Around this time, Tom Good, another photographer, joined us. Figuring that I already had the shot that I thought I wanted out in the field, I let the two of them take over the photo shoot. While they did their thing, I started snapping some candid shots from behind the scenes. 

This first candid shot shows off the structure nicely:

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While Brian and Tom were getting their shots, another idea popped into my head... What if this structure represented the very beginning of her building the ice castle up on the mountain? For an experiment, I asked her to put her hands in the air and look right up the center of these three rusted "things" extending from the ground.

As a base image, this worked out quite well to start with. I positioned myself so the sun was directly behind one of these twisty pillars, adding some good glow to the scene overall. 

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The next step would be in post-production work inside of Photoshop. Personally, I don't think a power poll, chair lift, warehouse, or vehicles really represent the feeling of the movie Frozen one bit. This is especially true when you consider we are going for the ice castle on the side of a steep mountain slope.

These objects were all removed with some simple combinations of content aware filling, cloning, and healing.

Next came coloring the scene. Using quick select with refine edge on the rusted object made it simple to extract it out from the rest of the image. Only Hue/Saturation and Brightness/Contrast adjustment layers were used on it. The texture already there on the rust when given a colder tint made it look like the perfect ice texture!

Similarly, the ground was selected, and the same adjustment layers were applied to it, with some minor tweaks to account for the fact the ground had a different started color compared to the structure.  The center of the structure is a metal sign embedded in the ground, which gives off that subtle diffused reflection that would be expected from ice as well.

Lastly, a stock image of a few wave patterns overlaid on top of one another in a single image was used for the ice beam itself. The beam was warped to reshape it from an even wave to tapered size: starting small from Elsa, to large near the structure. 

And here you have it, the final output! About two hours worth of work, almost all of it from masking out the different layers. The coloring and effects were applied fairly quickly afterwards!

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"Building The Ice Castle" - Photo by Darkain Multimedia - Cosplay by Pastel Moon