Project 24: Extreme Distortion.

This is one of them projects when you first look at it you think god that's going to be complicated but actually its not as bad as it seems. For this project your asked to look at extreme distortion and the effects that can be produced when using the Liquify tool.

To begin with you're given the two photos above to work with and asked to create a image where the measuring tape appears to be wrapped very tightly around the apple resulting in it looking as if its being squeezed. To do this the first step is to make the apple look squeezed, to do this i used the Liquify tool in the filtered menu, when selected i made the brush size around half the size of the apple then click first on the left hand side of the apple and dragged inwards and then repeated the process on the right hand side. Next i copied and pasted the measuring tape into the apple image and scaled it down to fit around the distorted area I'd just created, from here its beginning to look like the finished product but one little alteration i still wanted to make was to use the warp tool i have in my version of photoshop to make the fit even more realistic.

Above is the final version of my image, compared to the version on the course disc i haven't squeezed the apple anywhere near as much because i think it appear overly distorted if you push it as far as they have. If you look below I've produced my pepper image in a similar way to the apple one but this time I've gone to far more of an extreme approach. To me these kind of images work much better with the idea of less equals more, the less distortion added the better they look.

For the final part of this project you're asked to produce you're own conceptual image in which shape changing will make a point, so for this i came up with the idea of using the symbol of money and a belt to reflect the state of the economy and how everyone is having to so called tighten there metaphorical belts. Above is the photo of some money i used and below is the belt image i took for the other half of my final shot. I did have some problems matching the lighting of the two images but i feel i resolved this problem in the end through use of the flash. This is an area I've always struggled in and hope with further practice to resolve or at least get a better handle on.

The final image below was produced following the same process as in the first part of the project, what i like about it is the good contrast between the purple of the notes and the green of the belt they help to make it a good piece. The only criticism i do have on it is that at the time when i produced the image i was very happy with the amount of distortion I'd used but now when i look at it i feel maybe i over did it and that should i come back to this project a little reduction in the liquifying process would make it look better. Yet again maybe I'm being a bit over critical of my own work but i do find that if i look to long or to often at anything i take i slow start to dislike it and can always find things that I'd alter, but when I've fix that problem I'll find something else. I think all photographers go through a stage of hating there own work its just one of them things I'll have to work through.