Photo Montage

The name of my latest assignment in photography had to do with photo montages.  I'm not sure if this just what my professor calls this idea or if this is the technical term, but the assignment was to take photos I shot myself and combine them into one or two compositions in such a way that they look realistic, as if I took that photo with my camera in real life.  The point of the assignment was to work with perspective and use Photoshop to ensure it appeared natural, keeping in mind proportions, lighting, shadows, focus, ISO etc. in terms of one-point perspective.  It had to look real and convincing.

My first idea explored the paradox of progress as it relates to technology, handheld devices specifically.  We all know how we can get absorbed into our phones and become so distant from others or what is going on around us.  I'm not going to go into the social or societal impact or give my two cents on the matter; we all know how alienating these devices can be.  I wanted to illustrate this idea by setting up social scenarios or settings in which social interaction are usually going on, but with everyone on their devices, and use a photo of them being social over the first photo.  I would use this as the base photo and desaturate it flatten the colors and make it look quite dull, and then cutout the people from the "social" photo, drop the opacity to 30-40%, and keep the original color to emphasize the vibrance and happiness of everyone interacting.

The idea sounded good in my head, but I didn't quite like my results.  Here is one of them:

Family Dinner by Kyle Dodd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

It conveys the point, but I only if it is explained beforehand, I think.  Another reason I was dissatisfied with this was because I felt that it didn't meet the criteria of the project.  I didn't appropriate other photos into it and adjust them to match a certain perspective, I didn't need to focus on keeping lighting, focus, focal length or perspective across images because I basically took the same one twice, just having the models do something different.  I did have to use multiple images for the "social" side of it, since movement was a problem in the low light and lack of a real tripod, but I didn't have to transform the content at all to match the base photo, because it already did.  The only thing I did to keep a realistic perspective was add in the shadow under the woman's arm on the right as she passes the man something.  Another key disappointment was that it didn't appear realistic, as if I had taken the shot in real life like that.  When in real life is there two of a person, much less doing two different things?

So I got my brain cranking on another idea.  Mom was there to help brainstorm ideas and soon I was able to piece together an idea that would be elegantly simple and meet the criteria perfectly.  We got on the subject of games centered around this idea of replacing parts or players of the game with people.  In this way I could show how people are a part of a game, for better or worse, and pawns in the game of chess came to mind. So my new idea became this one about how we may just be pawns in someone's game.

I was much more satisfied with these results as far as composition goes and meeting the project criteria:

Just Pawns in a Game by Kyle Dodd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

I used the studio to shoot the chess board with what lighting I wanted, and then took full portraits of the models with the same lighting and Photoshopped them in where the pawns would go.  Editing in shadows, transforming the people to the correct sizes, and white balancing each photo to keep consistent color was easy enough.  I didn't even have to worry about one-point perspective changes between photos (I didn't have to worry about objects which were closer to the camera being in sharper focus than objects further away) since they were at the same depth of field as the rest of the chess pieces.

Some criticisms included the fact that come chess pieces seem to reflect onto the board and I neglected to create reflections for the people and that the people looked a bit blurry (except for the right most person).  I did think the people were too sharp for the background and did blur them a bit, and I must have too much.

Overall the critique was positive and I was given compliments for the work by my peers, even for the first image (I submitted both).  Thanks to Mom for helping me come up with this idea, hope you enjoy what you helped create.