#fourth shoot

While doing my shoot I ticked off the images from my shot list as I took them, so did not miss any. This meant I would be able to have all the images I needed to create the final photographs. I did smaller shoots for each image to get them right and working really well before moving location. While shooting the images I used a tripod to make sure all images were taken at the same angle and framing. This was for continuity and to make the editing easier with all the layer fitting together.

I really thought about lighting in the images, so took them throughout the day to get them correct and not too dark or light. I considered shadows or lack of them to made sure lighting in the pictures was all the same so in editing there was no differences in the layers. I made sure the backgrounds of the images were not busy so that the action stood out.

  I used a slightly different editing techniques this time, to make the colours all blend in together for a seamless look to the images on the different layers. I did this by trying to erase as little of the images as possible to keep the original colours, using sections of the image to make up the missing colours to avoid different shades in the image.

  I took pictures of objects against a white sheet to give a plain background so I could use them to make up the bigger images. I took these images at the same distance away from camera that the original scene images were taken, to fit them easily together and keep proportions correct.

   The bike photo was the hardest image to edit correctly together, and most time consuming. I had to make up the entire bike correctly with several layers, once that was done I remade the background up, finally remaking the clothes. All the images are made up of several layers to make them look effective and to rebuild all the elements in them. I feel once the images are completed, they have a strong impact and are effective as they get the audience to question how the images were created. This is because they cannot see all the layers in the images so you only see the one layer.

As I feel my shoots are not turning out as well as they could, I am going to try a different approach. Instead of doing one large shoot of all my shoots; I will do smaller shoots of each scene to create one image. Once I have taken all the images to make up one photo of a scene I will edit them to make sure all the layers fit together and the angle is right. If it all works together then I will move onto another image, if not I will reshot until it is perfect and looks realistic. This approach means I can see what I need to change sooner rather than doing a whole shoot with no images I can work with. I made a shot list I could refer to, so that I did not move location before I had captured all the images I needed to edit the scene together.

  To make sure all my images were taken from the same angle I held the camera still while shooting to make the images easier to fit together in editing. I used the original framing of the images, which worked best and really worked on controlling the light to make the images correctly exposed. In doing this I had control over where the shadows would be in my images or if I would have any as I could shoot at different times of the day.