MODULE GCD: Digital Photography & Imaging
02/11/2023 - 07/12/2023 : Week 6 - Week 11
Tristan Vaughan Sleep - 0365120
Digital Photography & Imaging / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Main Group 3
Project 2A + 2B: Double Exposure + Conceptual Product Photoshoot
MODULE INSTRUCTION:
“AUG - DEC 2023: GCD 60104 / DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY MODULE INFORMATION BOOKLET”
PROJECT 2A: Double Exposure (Week 7 - 8)
Double Exposure: In this upcoming exploration, students of the cohort are expected to gather a collection of interesting images & materials using online sources required to create a ‘Double Exposed Image.’ By using the provided extensive resources and practical demonstrations, students should learn how to create the ‘double exposure effect’ by merging multiple images using filters & Clipping masks. The final goal of this project is to ensure that students can produce a series of surreal, emotional or humorous images - using the silhouettes of the subjects.
PROJECT 2B: Product Photoshoot (Week 9 - 11)
Conceptual Product Photoshoot: In this upcoming explorations, students of the cohort are expected to research & gather a collection of ‘product-sized-objects’ in order to produce a surrealistically designed “Product Photoshoot.” Students are recommended to subject and shoot their objects using suitable lighting techniques - ensuring that each element is clearly defined. Once all necessary objects have been photographed, students will need to combine them using Photo Manipulation in order to produce an interesting surreal design. Finally, students are expected to explain the concept of their design & the process of the development.
PROJECT 2A: Double Exposure (Week 7 - 8)
WEEK 7: Experimenting with Double Exposure
In order for the cohort to continue developing their understanding of Adobe Photoshop, our Lecturer, Mr Yusoff wanted to introduce students to the concept of “Double Exposure” and how to use it in our upcoming works. ‘Double Exposure Photography’ in their own words, is a digital practice in which multiple images are able to be merged atop of one another in order to create a “surreal, emotional, or humorous image.” Double Exposure is mainly recognised by its use of figure silhouettes.
“Examples provided of Double Exposure Photography”
In essence, ‘Double-Exposure’ is often used in works in order to create a striking visual - often being presented in touch-ups such as introducing ‘Fake Reflections’ or ‘tilt-shifts’ in more artistic pieces. Regardless, this exploration is mainly meant for students to experiment with organisation & creative use of silhouettes using ‘Double-Exposure’ - in preparation for a potential trick we may wish to include in future works.
To ensure that students would understand processes of the exploration, Mr Yusoff would provide the class with a video-tutorial as well as provide an in-lesson demonstration on some of the small problems which often caused students issues. Additionally, Mr Yusoff would also give the class working documents along with additional files to begin practising ‘Double-Exposure’ before we would need to create our own using gathered resources.
As echoed by the lecturer, ‘Double-Exposure’ is quite an easy process in regards to other Adobe Cloud projects. In essence, students would need to take the previous week’s learning on ‘selecting’ figures to cut-out in order to make a usable silhouette. From here, students would be able to begin creating double exposures by placing additional elements above the silhouette and setting each layer as a “layering mask.” This way, all new elements would remain limited by the silhouette. Additionally, students could add “clipping masks” which is what allows for features such as the woman’s face to remain visible.
“Double Exposure using layers in Adobe Photoshop”
With a majority of the effects completed, students would need to create duplicates of the layer mask and Invert the image to create a reflection. With its clipping mask edited, all students would need to do now is add extra elements such as the clouds and birds (useful to apply ‘Darken Modifier’ to birds to lose the white background.) Ultimately, this project was quite easy to complete once I managed to figure out how the layer selection worked - helping to produce my own version of the piece.
“My Double Exposure following the video Tutorial”
WEEK 8: Finalising piece with Double Exposure
As students should now have a reasonable understanding of how to produce & replicate the ‘Double-Exposure’ Effect, students would be tasked with creating their own version - without using the same elements provided with the video tutorial. In essence, this week’s activity would be a repeat of the previous week’s however, students would need to explore the technique, using their own creativity.
In order to produce my own version of the piece, I would mainly be looking for landscapes of cities with a solid colour sky. As this would prove a mounting task, I instead had selected an image of a street and would need to manually crop out the sky for the intended effect to work. From there, I would select my subject from the first Project’s catalogue of figures; however, this would also require me to convert the image to greyscale as this often produced the best pieces when applying filters later. With my resources selected, I would begin following a similar process to the one we had done the previous week until I ended up with a similar looking project.
“My Double Exposure piece”
For my final piece, I wanted to add extra elements in order to make it feel a bit more original which I was quite happy with. Continuing with the spirit of the task, I wanted to add an opposing detail in the form of the blue stroke across the person’s eyes. I would still use the ‘double-exposure’ effect to further create opposition as the image used would be an photo-inverted image of a forest (vs a cityscape.) To add more detail to the piece, I also wanted to create a border-shape around the image in the shape of a paint-stroke and although I was successful, it would be the element I would probably change should I ever repeat this process.
PROJECT 2B: Product Photoshoot (Week 9 - 11)
WEEK 9: Introduction to Surrealism
This week would be the start of our final Module-exclusive assignment for ‘Digital Photography & Imaging’ and would serve as a final checkpoint to see what we’ve learnt over the semester. Our final assignment would be inspired by the concept of surrealist styles - with students needing to practise their photography and design a product by combining two items. For the project, students would need to collect a series of items which we would need to bring to a photography studio and photograph. For this week however, students were recommended to begin working on developing some concept sketches for the assignment as well as looking for inspiration on the internet.
Assignment Research:
“Concept by ‘an_Improbable_future’”
“Concept by ‘paulfuentes_designs’”
“Concept by ‘jurgen.design’”
While working on my research, I decided to look for some interesting designs which can be found on social Media such as Instagram or Pinterest. As shown above, these are some of the few designs I’ve discovered and will be the one I'll be referencing in future. When looking into the “_,” this style often sees designs where two items are combined due to them having similar shapes or are in reference to puns/visual gags. Additionally, these designs often feature very vivid colours.
When looking at some examples of the Conceptual Product Photoshoots, I liked the idea that most of the images consisted of items with similar shapes being blended together (Most likely through clipping masks.) Another thing I was interested in was the surrealness of the images, most of which were joke-based. Ultimately, I would carry these two concepts forward when thinking of some ideas.
1 - “Apple Watch:” To be taken very literally; image would be of a sliced apple merged with wrist straps of a watch. Fun details would include re-attachment of the dials and the seeds being used as clock hands.
2- “Smartwatch:” Similar idea to the first; an idea to harp about watches having the same features and controls as modern phones. Decided to combine the two in a surrealist way
3 - “The World’s Game:” Football (or Soccer) is often considered the game for the world and I wanted to visually recreate the expression by replacing a globe with a football. A simple & basic surrealistic idea
4 - “Electronic Mouse:” An idea based on the fact that a ‘mouse’ can refer to the rodent or the external computer device. It would be a simple fun idea to combine the two.
5 - “Portable entertainment:” Considering modern console development, I was inspired to mix modern technology and modelling off the first handhelds. In essence, turning a modern PS5 controller into a PSP type object - basic ideas.
“Sketches”
WEEK 10: Studio Photography
As previously mentioned, a portion of this assignment is dependent on the student’s ability to photograph items (which we should have been working to collect in the previous week.) Therefore, this week would see the cohort heading to the on-campus photography studio where we would need to begin staging and photographing our items. It is important to note that students would be marked on our general ability to present subjects in photographs thus; students would need to consider elements such as angle, temperature & intensity of lighting as well as how bright the studio would need to be to yield the preferred results.
While in the studio, I would begin placing the necessary items in order to start combining them in Photoshop, ensuring I had consistent lighting between items. Looking back at the captured photographs, I was not too happy with how some of them had turned out as the temperature of the image would randomly change. Additionally, because of the other students in the studio, the room itself was not lit too well as some students required more/less lighting for their assignments. Finally, I am not too happy with the harsh lighting marks on some of the items - some highlights become perfectly white while shadows are perfectly black.
“Example of photographs taken in the studio”
In an attempt to try and get better photos, I decided to re-create a small shooting-studio at home - being made from any loose Items I could. This was ultimately done because I wanted to get better lighting in the scene which would be very useful in the later stages and would help with my photography. Because I was quite limited by my resources, I was hopefully able to make something more akin to a studio scene with some similar lighting. Looking at the backdrop in both images, I chose to use the back of a poster and purposely leave it to curve onto the table - similar to professional photography backdrops. These backdrops are often used when shooting as it reflects the light enough to provide a soft backlight - creating depths.
“Home-studio setup”
Another idea I wanted to experiment with was two-tone lighting; in many cases that I’ve seen, opposing colours are chosen to light an object with slight overlap. Again, I believe this is also done as it conveys depth on an object but can also be used to produce deeper shadows on one side of the object. This would be useful as I wanted a deeper shadow on the right with more focus on the left.
“Example of photographs taken in home-made studio”
Despite the changes I tried to implement, the lighting was still a bit harsh as it was made as there were still visible white streaks due to the light reflecting. Ultimately, I believe the cause of this type of issue to be caused by the material of the watch - being polished, metallic & highly reflective.
WEEK 11: Finalising the Product Photoshoot
In order for me to be able to finally close-out this final assignment (in reference to the Module Exclusive assignments;) This week would see me and the rest of the cohort taking all the work we’ve developed over the past few weeks and compiling them into a single image: Our Conceptual Product Design. In essence, students would need to collect and port over all their Image Photography into Adobe Photoshop and combine the elements to create a surreal looking Product. When looking at my images and my sketch ideas, I thought it would be easiest to try to create a “Living Computer mouse” and thus compiled elements of the ‘logitech mouse’ & ‘keychain.’
Development of Final Image:
Switching Over to Adobe Photoshop, I would begin my work by importing the necessary images and selecting the ‘Key Elements’ in each image. To do this, I would start using the Smart Selection Tool to get the rough shape before cleaning-up the shape with the Refine Brush found in the “select & mask Window.” This proved to be a bit difficult with the tail & ears as the fluff was different colours which often confused the “refine stroke tool” and I would need to do some section by hand once-over.
Image File
“Process of Painting-out shapes in Photoshop”
Despite how effective these tools can be, some items such as the ‘Logitech Mouse’ still had slight artifacting as a result of the mouse being propped-up on a small stand. In order to get the desired shape of the ‘Mouse,’ I would need to use the “Healing-Brush Tool” in photoshop to help remove the stand as much as possible. Although the “healing Effect” looks great as it painted-out the stand, it still leaves such left-over artifacts such as an odd shadow and weird bumps along the bottom of the ‘mouse.’
“Process of ‘Healing’ the mouse in Photoshop”
To make the piece look more like a real item in a space, I needed to re-insert some believable shadows to help convey depth + space. In order to achieve this: I made a duplicate of all layers, applied all layer masks, merged the shape together and used the hue contrast filter to blacken the shape. As seen by the floating image in the top right, I referenced the lengths & positioning of the shadows I tried to replicate. In order to lengthen the shadow on the blue side - I would stretch it using the bicubic distort (as seen in the left image.) To make the shadow dissipate due to the second light source, I would use the “Blur-field” effect and make two points - the furthest being significantly more blurred. Additionally I decided to create a background that was inspired by the vivid colours used in surrealism - sourcing the colours from the original floating image.
“Process of creating double-angle shadow in Photoshop”
The Final effect I chose to add was a small additive light on the top which is what the original ‘Logitech Mouse’ has. I was able to achieve a similar look by using the ‘polygraph pen’ tool and applying effects to it such as the ‘Glow-Layer Modifier’ & the ‘Inner-Glow modifier.’ this can make the glow look more realistic as it projects a small light around the area as well as making the centre of the light glow brighter/different colours. But in order for the light to look a bit more diegetic, I played around with a Hue/Saturation clipping mask and tweaked the colour to appear more like a slightly washed yellowish colour as the Orange studio light would mix and the natural studio light would wash out the colour.
“Process of creating the glowing point in Photoshop”
The Final Render for the Conceptual Product
"LOGI's Electronic Mouse - Natural Edition:" I originally intended to combine two elements in order to make a visual pun based on how ‘mouse’ can be used in two different ways. Although the keychain animal was not a mouse, the idea still comes across in its surreal depiction. Overall, I’m happy with how it turned out.
“Final Render achieved using Photoshop”
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