"...it[fall] settles in a way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you." [Stephan King, Salem's Lot]

This collage was created in four layers from four photos: A small garden statuette, a painted wall, autumn leaves and leave less branches behind a wooden fence.

I used the wall as basic layer and added the statuette as second layer using different degrees of transparency. The photo of the branches and fence was transformed to a silhouette. The silhouette was extracted from the background and used as third layer using again gradual transparency. The autumn leaves were used as fourth and final layer. I merged the layers and converted to sepia, adjusted the exposure and cropped the collage.

[Note: I always keep save the original file of photos for reference. I use copies for the working file and save all layers separately for the case I need or want to change something. I save those work files usually on an external hard drive since those files could get very big and otherwise clutter the vivid memory of the computer.]