The initial photo is of the 2 ¾th inch president model (Carat C 1) , using flour as the "foam" for the wake, over the stained glass "sea" diorama base. I used dark paper to mask out the white inside the diorama to get a deeper sea color. Clearly this has a large effect, I'll have to make slots for paper inserts to "tone" the setup in the final version.

From there, I took the image into WinImages running under Parallels in Mac OSX (where it runs absolutely flawlessly, BTW), masked out the ship, filled in the resulting hole with more water clipped from elsewhere in the image, applied a geometric wave distortion to the result, then layered the clipped-out ship back on top of all that. Then I applied some turbulence to the wake behind the ship, used a simple area fill with grey and a radially transparent mask to build the smoke trail, and finally, I hunted up a shot of a dolphin off the net and masked that into the waves (nearside, center... you'll have to look at a larger version to see it.)

Remaining flaws: I didn't get the ship quite back where it was, and so there are some ghosts of the masts and rigging visible; the angle of the ship's progress is just slightly off from that of the wake; the smoke puffs have too "hard" a central transparency, I should have made them about 50% at the center instead of 100%. I could have fixed all of these issues if I'd been a little more meticulous during the WinImages session. Not one of them was anything but an error in technique on my part. Sigh. Oh well, each of these creations is a learning experience.

Canon EOS 40D, Canon EF 100 mm ƒ/2.8 macro USM prime @ ƒ/20, 800 ISO, 1/4th sec exposure, tripod, 10s fire delay to avoid tripod shake, available light (8, 20w fluorescent tubes and three eco-coiled 10w lamps.)

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