Project 26: A Sequence In One Image.

For this project i had to produce something a little different in that in one single image i had to show a sequence of photos all blended together that portrayed movement in some way. To do this the best route was to get my camera mounted on my tripod and then keeping the camera in the same position shot the sequence i wanted. Being interested in wildlife photography i was on the look out for a suitable subject and one day i court site of a small rabbit that i thought might provide me with the perfect image. After positioning myself very quietly so as not to scare him off i settled in for a wait to see what kind of activity i might capture and was pleasantly surprised when he started to give himself a good clean. To begin with i did worry that the shutter noise might scare him off but luckily he seem completely happy for me to be there and never ran off till i was happy with what i captured and was packing up to leave.

When i came to combining the shots i found i had a small problem that i hadn't foreseen in that he hadn't move as much as I'd thought meaning that all the images just overlayed one another creating just a complete blur so i alter the way i combined the images to produce something a bit different because i was really happy with my shots and wanted to use them in some fashion. Below is what i finally produced.

In the course folder the first example they give you of this kind of imagery is of a bird of prey flying through the frame, although mine is similar in that its a series of images stitched together side by side it isn't exactly the same as you can see but it still show a series of images depicting movement in one single image. I did have a little trouble in blending the joins so that they aren't so obvious but in the end i think it turned out well. I know it isn't exactly what you're ask to produce but on the other hand i think it a good study of a wild animal and a different way of portraying animal behavior.

Photos I Didn't Use In Assignment 4.

What i present here is the collection of photos that i haven't chosen to use in my 4th Assignment for various reason which I'll explain as i go through them.

The problem i had with this first photo wasn't that the blend didn't work very well it was more the fact that there wasn't any real connection between the two images i used where as the majority of the work i sent to my tutor had some connection of one type or another. Its not bad but it just doesn't work right.

The next image i do quiet like but what made me leave it out of my final selection was because of the way the lines in the back wall make it feel as if the background is on a big slant compared to the door. I did try straightening the image in photoshop but found that when I'd straightened the background the door ended up instead at a very strange angle. A same in the end but its down to the fact that I'd did observe properly how the lines in the frame were running when i shot it.

This shot i again discounted firstly because of the lines in the tiles not appearing straight enough, i think this was more down to the wall then myself. Secondary, and the main problem was the way the colours didn't seem to work right together, because the tiles are such a bright colour i didn't think the darkness of the water and the shadows really help it to become a particularly appealing image. I did consider trying it as a black and white image but as it would have been the only one in the collection i discounted it straight away as it wouldn't have fit in at all.

The final image lost out because it didn't fit in with the overall theme, one it isn't an interior view that i placed a landscape into and secondly with only the small amount of colour in it it wouldn't have appear right with the rest of my work. I thought the symbolism of the shot works really well because the original is of the wall at the national memorial arboretum which has the names of all service people kill since the second world war on it and then with the poppies added over the top it just works.

Planning For Assignment 4.

For this assignment I'm asked to produce 8 landscape photographs which all address, in different ways, a common theme.(The suggested themes begin water, earth, fire, air) Clearly here I'm given alot of scope to be able as creative as i can be, my first thought was keep things simple and just shot a range of images following one of these theme and then use some of the methods I'd studied in the last section say to alter the light conditions or change the feel of the weather. The problem being that i can't say i feel overly inspired by this idea, but then the other day i read an article that gave me a much better idea.

Below are some examples of images produced by a photographer call Abelardo Morell (photos taken from his website http://www.abelardomorell.net/).

He produces these images in a mix of old fashion camera obscura technique and digital photography, what he does is first is turn a room completely dark by covering all the windows except for a small whole which the light from outside travels through and projects the image onto the opposite wall (it originally appears upside down but by using a prism he corrects this) then he captures the effect using a modern camera. Basically its alot like the way our own eyes capture images, what makes his work so interesting is the combination of the rooms and views that he finds and combines. Lets take the final example where the outside garden has be projected onto the wall, here its like you have to look twice to decide which parts are in the room and which are in the garden because the house plants blend so well into the theme. I also like the way the texture of the walls adds another dimension to an already clever concept.

What I'm thinking of doing for this assignment is something along the same idea but using photoshop to place landscapes onto the walls of room, i want it to feel like I've brought the outside into the room but i still want it to feel natural so maybe there should be some association between the two scenes. I'll have to think more on this but i thinks there's a good starting idea here.

Project 25: Blending Body Parts.

This was a project that I'd been looking forward to tackling because it's an area that I've attempted to play around with before but never had much success with so here goes.

Basically what I'm looking at here is creating some Surrealist images, what these are are images that are believable to look at but you know that there impossible in the really world. This kind of imagery has been around alot longer then photography but with modern photography software we're capable of producing some very original photos that in the past you might have only seen in paintings.

What I'm asked to do to begin with is take the hand image on the left and the tool on the right and combined them into one believable image. This is where I'd run into problems before because i could never get the blending quiet right but with the explanation here things went much better. The first job was to open the hand image ,then the tool shot and in this using the selection brush pick out the tool from the background. Next after pasting the tool over the second finger a little re-scaling was need just to fit the two parts together and then the harder work began, first i need to erase the handle of the scissor tool because with it spreading across the fingers it spoils the effect some what. With this done i set the eraser opacity to 20% and began to erase around the base of the tool so as to begin to blend the tool and finger seemingly together. Finally i flattened the layers as i was happy with the result which you can now see below.

I have to say this is by far the best blend I've ever done, i never really played around with the opacity before this course but now can understand the creativity that it give you because of the control over how much of the image below you let through at any time. Where i also have run into problems in the past has been with the consistency of the light when producing work like this, what i mean is that I'd shot one image and then in the next the light wouldn't appear the same and as much as I'd try I'd never seem to get it right but in the next part of the project I'd have to because what I'm next as to do is produce my own Surrealist image.

What i decided i wanted to do was combine a very natural image with something a little less natural so first i captured a few plant images and some wildlife shots of birds and insects. In the end i selected the above shot because i thought I'd be able to alter the petals and centre area in some way.

Next i had to find my unnatural image to add to it, above is the photo i took which I'd use for the central mass of the flower but i also tried to find metallic surfaces that i could then blend into the petals. This i found didn't work very well and i felt i was over complicating the subject a little so in the end i only work on the centre of the flower. It still ended up as a pretty good image as you can see below because it really looks as if the glass marble is part of the plant.

I used the red and yellow marble because of how the reds compliments the yellow so well and keeps the theme of warm colours which using the blue ones would have broke up. I feel that i handled my lighting problems pretty well but I'm still not that happy with this part of the process. This project is defiantly one i plan to come back to and have another crack at because i still feel that i can do something with the petals i just have to find the right image.

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.

Project 23: Facial Distortion.

As i move into looking at Distortion Tools and techniques the first project looks at easily the most widely know and most seen area of photography where these kind of techniques are used Portrait Photography. We're all use these days to seeing photos of celebrities where they've had a little work done digitally so most people have a little understanding of some of the methods used such as air brushing and now there are even dedicated pieces of software that are dedicated to this process. What I'm about to look at here is only a very basic couple of distortion tools but as ever they can drastically alter the appearance of an image.

Original Wide Angled Image.

Above is the first image I'm given to work on and as the title says its been taken with a wide angled lens which in its self has had an effect on how the subject appears. What the wide angle does is exaggerate in size anything that is nearer the camera so most professional photographs would opt for a medium telephoto lens to combat this problem. If you don't have this available to you there are ways to fix the distortion produced by the wide angle lens and that's what my next set of photos looks at.

Pinch Filter Extreme Distortion 1.

Punch Filter Extreme Distortion 2.




Pinch Filter At 10%.

The first two photos above show the kind of extreme that can be created when using a Pinch Filter. What a Pinch Filter actually does is reverse the wide angle lens effect when the slider is moved into the positive by pulling the centre of the image inwards (2), and when moved into the negative it has the opposite effect (1). What soon becomes clear when playing around with this filter is that it's only very small amounts of positive movement needed to correct the distortion so in the final image above where I've added only 10% you can see that the face appears much more in proportion so that the eyes and nose don't appear larger then they actually were.

For the next stage of this project I'm asked to use a portrait of my own and experiment with the Pinch and Spherize filters so as to gain more experience with how they effect the proportions of the face, the image I'm using above already to me looks strange in that the head and feature look over blown so now I'm going to look at how the filters effect it and if they improve it.

Pinch 25%.

Pinch 50%.

What the pinch filter does is to reduce the size of the features such as the eyes and nose but doesn't appear to alter the head size. What I've ended up with is something that almost creates a cartoon stile effect of the subject, especially in the final image.

Spherize 20%.

Spherize -10%.

When the Spherize filter is used in a positive manner it only increase the distortion making things appear even larger then ever, but what i did find was that when used in the negative at only 10% it reduced the distortion to the point that it appeared the natural and improves the overall look of the person.

In today's world in which how you look is very important for many reasons you can understand why these kind of tools are an important part of a portrait photographers arsenal and understanding the distortions that some lens create is very important. I guess people weren't lying when they said the camera can add 10 pounds.

Project 22: An Improvement In The Weather.

The next project continues along similar lines as the last but this time its more about improving the apearance of the weather in the image rather than making it seem worse.


Here we have a shot that has been taken with the light not quiet at its best resulting in the colours appearing very dull and the overall shot being a little bit of a let down, so how can this be fixed in photoshop? Well suprisingly again its a fair simple process which unfortunatley is made more difficult by the fact that some of the files that are supposed to help you are missing from the course disc (i look everywhere and couldn't locate them, maybe it's just my disc). It tells you they you should find the pre-selected areas presumable made up of the foreground, mountains in the background and the sky on the disc but there just not there so using the selection brush i made them myself. The first area to work on is the foreground, to begin with i used the Levels tool closing up the white and black points to produce a better contrast in this area. Next to give the colours the appearance of more stronger sunlight i used the Hue/Saturation tool using the setting given in the course folder (them being Hue -15 and Saturation +30), this does produce one problem which is the red path becomes very dominat so to fix this i then select Reds from the drop down menu and moved the Hue slider to -10 making it fit more closely with the rest of the colours. With this area finish its time to move on to the sky again i begin by using the Levels tool this time i close up the white point but only alter the black point very slightly because i don't want any pure dark areas in the sky as i'm trying to make the light appear brighter and stronger. Following this i moved to the Hue/Saturation tool but this time i'm only interested in the Cyans colour so selecting this from the drop down menu i can remove this particular colour cast by moving the slider to +15. The final alteration you're told to make is to the mountains in the background as the author whats them much darker to make the city on the hill top really jump out and hit you between the eyes, for this it tells you to use Enhance>Adjust Colour>Replace Colour but i found a better way for me to get the right effect was to just darken it using Brightness/Contrast as it provides the same effect in my eyes. So below you'll find the finished image is it an improvement well yes because it now appears to have been take on a much brighter day because the colours look strong and there's much more contrast and detail visible then in the original. Now the question is can a repeat the process in one of my own images?

For this part of the project i have chosen the above image because it has some of the same problems as the course image in that the light being quiet dull has meant that a lot of the colour and detail has been lost from the foreground so hopefully following the same process i should now have the skills to fix it. Below is the results of my processing, to achieve this look i first selected the foreground and only used the Hue/Saturation tool to bring back the colours that had been lost, what i didn't do was go anywhere near the sky or the background, you may argue that sky could have done with the brightest areas being dulled but i like the way this looks and now with the colours more in keeping with this brightness it makes the whole shot feel right.

I could have gone for a more challenging image to alter but i felt after the previous project and with the work I'd done in this i have a pretty good grasp on how to alter the appearance of the weather and light in my landscape imagery, as i said in the last project I've taken more from this because of how it relates to my personal interest but i still agree with my original thought that i would only use this as a last resort if i wasn't able to capture the conditions i was after, with the weather in this country begin as unpredictable as ever though it might end up being more often then I'd like.