Assignment four Real or Fake?

Assignment four is to illustrate a magazine or book title this can be either a real or made up one, with a photograph that is not quite true.

I have chosen to use an outdoor lantern and then put a person inside, I am undecided at the moment whether to use one person in several positions or whether to try using different people I think this is something that will evolve with the photograph.

Part of my inspiration came from my husband, originally I wanted to use a light bulb with someone inside for that 'light bulb' moment, but as I was having difficulties getting the sort of bulb I wanted he suggested I tried our garden lantern.

Other inspiration came from the films 'The borrowers 'and 'Honey I shrunk the kids'.  Just thinking again about the film 'Honey I shrunk the kids' I might try to include a magnifying glass in the photograph too. however I decided against this and finally settled to have a girl in the lantern and call it 'Girl in the Lantern' this was a change to my original ideas and was finally inspired by the television series 'I dream of Genie'.

Below is a rough sketch of what I am hoping to achieve.

You will see from this drawing that I have included the magnifying glass but as I have said previously I decided against using one.

Above is the selection of photographs I started with I then had to work out which ones I wanted and how I was going to combine them into one. Below is the photographs I finally decided to use although until I start I am not sure how the sky is going to work in the photograph I think I will need to play that particular photograph and see where it goes.

The three chosen shots are opened in camera raw, I adjusted the clarity of each one, darkened the sky slightly and adjusted for highlight clipping on the lantern.

This assignment really is a journey for me I don't like the lantern it just doesn't work as I wanted so after a lot of frustration I am going to try just having the girl jumping in the sky. My inspiration was seeing the photograph of the girl and the sky and realising that the way she is jumping and full of life it looks like she could jump through the clouds.

Finally I have got the photo I wanted, to make up the photograph I opened the sky and adjusted the clarity and darkened the exposure slightly. I then opened the girl and again adjusted the clarity.
Using the rectangular marquee tool I cut the girl out having refined the end first and pasted her on to the sky, I then used a mixture of erasing and cloning to get the finish result.

My ethical justification for this photograph is that although I have pasted the girl onto the sky it is not too fake in that this sort of photograph could almost be taken on the top of a mountain where it is possible to go through the clouds. Looking at the final photograph I think a set of balloons in her hand would have been a good idea.

 

Overall this was an interesting section, I admit photo shop is something that I am still learning but I think that the whole course is a learning curve there fore there is no reason why I can't learn more about things as I go along, if I wasn't doing this I would feel as though my journey had stopped.

 

The Feedback

The tutor feedback has arrived and I always have a slight dread at reading through this, overall it is not normally as bad I think, sometimes I need to credit myself with a bit more confidence than I do. I have been told that the research is a bit sparse in terms of research, and development justification, and that I haven't explained my jump from the original idea to the final image in enough detail. I lost count of how many times I tried to photograph the lantern but it just didn't work, looking back I was trying to photograph it indoors with a white background maybe it would be better outdoors and have an outdoor back drop in the lantern. This is something I need to think over again and see what I can come up with if I am still not happy with the image I can at least post some of my attempts on here for people to see.

I have recently done a few photo shoots for various people and I will talk about my photography outside of this course in a separate page.

Overall I am not overly despondent about the feed back, I am looking at the positives as well as the negatives, this way I can correct the negatives and build on the positives. Photo shop really is a learning curve for me as is critiquing work but I am working hard to improve on both of these.

 

I have just boxed up my work ready to send for formal assesment and have realised I wanted to do another photograph for this section. I was interested in having another try at the photograph but with a slight addaption as I think it was the cutting out and placing of the image that let it down slightly.

 

This is an updated version of blending the jumping girl with a new background.

I think this is a better result.