UNIT 3 - AO1 - Photo Manipulation

For the start of the new unit we were asked to take three photographs from a selection of photographers then manipulate them in someway to create something new.

My main issue with this was that I myself found it far too difficult to distort & change the photograph in anyway as I thought it would spoil many of the elements that make an image what it is and take away its charm.

Non-the-less I decided to pick two photos from the photographer, Josef Koudelka and find a way to digitally distort each of them, here are the original photographs:

Left image - Liberec, Czech Republic, by Josef Koudelka 1960

Right Image - Josef Koudelka - Czechoslovakia, 1991. S

As I've mentioned before in other pieces, Koudelka's work is often features a high contrast in colour & texture. For example, In the left image Koudelka wanted to capture the smoke trails of the aerial dogfight above them so he exposed it so the trails were exposed correctly but the people were silhouetted which created the impression that they are over looking the scene just like us - both photographs also create a huge sense of scale with the aspect ratio being 21:9 instead of the stand 3:2 ratio which allows us to ingest the vast detail of both pictures landscapes.

And Heres what I've created, on the left you can see I've flipped Josef's panoramic upside down and merged it with one of my own film photographs, to make this work I took the original layer, flipped it upside down, imported my work then using the 'clone-stamp' tool I morphed both the physical cloud layers from the two photographs together with a 2px feather on and applied it to the borders of each photograph until the cloud layers appeared to be the same. Having the both the photographs in mono makes photo stiching like this so much easier as you just have to change the exposure & contrast until they both match, whereas if it the otherway round and I were doing this in colour I would have to also change the saturation and temperature to make the final product.

With the photo on the right I wanted to 'flip' things up a bit, I used the eliptical marquee tool and cut out a circle, I then flipped that 180' and cut out another circle with the same tool then flipped it back around to create the cut out.

I will admit that the second photoshop was more mundane than my previous product however when creating the two pieces I found my self conflicted because when your manipulating another photographers work you are more than likely to erase the messages of what the photographer was trying to capture and by doing so will also create the loss of the photos ultimate quintessence, with the first photograph I managed to keep some of the factors of Josef's original piece but I couldn't find anyway to change the second panorama dramatically without ruining the work so I did the 'flip around' to preserve atleast some of the aspects.

Overall I am satisfied with the work I have produced for this project however I have decided that I do not want to focus my work on photoshop as I believe in general its a shallow & negative tool in photography.