Photomontage Reaction

After our "100 photos" assignment, we were tasked with creating a photo montage using at least five of the pictures that we took. Through this project we get a chance to use the Adobe Photoshop suite to tell a new story with our 100 photos. I have quite a bit of experience using The Gimp, so I've had a pretty easy time of learning the Adobe Photoshop tools. Photoshop is kind of like The Gimp, with the interface of Blender 3d. Honestly, I still haven't found a tool in Photoshop that isn't in The Gimp. The tools are a little different, sometimes they're a little easier, other times harder. It's a toss up.

For my 100 photos project, I took photographs in three or four places. I have a bunch of photos in a grave yard, another bunch in a park, a few at home of my kids, and a few at my winery. At first I thought that I would try to create a brutalist, architectural landscape using the mossy headstones that I had photographed. The Rhetorical implications should be obvious, I hope. Eventually I realized that I really didn't have the photos taken from the right angles to pull it off. There were just too many perspectives in any given montage that I tried to assemble. To clarify, I would just quickly open five or six images, do some selecting and command-c, command-v action to place them in the same photo. I used the fuzzy select to select and cut out the un-desirable areas. Its pretty easy and quick way to shuffle the images and get a good idea of what you have to work with.

In general, I found that my images were taken at extreme angles. These extreme angles tended to make the photos difficult to  paste together and maintain any sense of reality. The light variation, focus..etc made it pretty clear that pasting most of the pictures together would yield a relatively long project indeed. At some point, I thought: "screw reality". Why not just take one of these orb headstone images that I had captured, and turn it into a little planet for my children to play on (a la little prince). Before long I had a pretty dramatic image, composed of only three images. From there it really became difficult to imagine how I could add anything without just ruining the composition. So I started to really drill down, and work on the images themselves.

I did my lazy "fuzzy select, remove" technique on the chain in my photo montage, but I could not do that with much success in pulling the children out of their photograph. Instead I had to mask them out. From there I clone stamped, and airbrushed my way to appropriate detail and light in the image. Through the work, I realized that I could add two more images as subtle details in the image. In the middle of the action, I realized that the resolution on the image of my children was so poor, that it would really stand out in print. I'll have to re-take that image with one of the school's fancy pants cannons. I'm a little intimidated, that I might not get the candid nature of the photo again. On the other hand, the kids do spend a lot of time in that exact same position in front of the tv. Just sort of awestricken, while hamming it up for the camera. The image is still, very much a work in progress so I really don't know how it will look in the end.