Exercise 4.8 Photomontage in Photoshop

Now that you’ve seen how to make a photo montage with newspaper cuttings, search through your archive of images to make a photo montage with your own photographs. Photomontage requires a playful experimental attitude to exploring different arrangements so don’t try to be too ‘tidy’ or perfect about your final result. • Decide on the different picture elements: the background, the different parts of the environment, objects and people in the environment. • Think in terms of depth: f/g, m/g, and b/g. • When you’ve completed your photo montage, photograph it or save it as a finished image.

Process: I have created a photo montage which consists of four individual images. The story of this final composite is simple.

“Once upon in the far far away land of Africa, it was a strange day. The moon appeared in the day, that too red in color. Legends say that on that day predators not native to Africa, like the Tiger, were seen on the red soils. On that day the hunter became the hunted as the biggest antelope of Africa, the Eland became the predator and the TIger the victim. What was even stranger was that a photographer all the way from India, was there to capture this on her camera, right when this moment happened.” 🙂

Hahaha… here you go

My four individual images are:

Process and learnings:

I really enjoyed this exercise. When I started to previsualize it, I planned out a completely different composite to make. When I actually started to identify the images, I came across Africa’s biggest antelope’s image and that’s where this story started to shape up. I remembered one of my sleeping tiger images that I thought I could use. Something as strange does not happen on a regular day so the moon came in and then finally need a “super pleased with myself” kind of an image so there came up this image that was taken in Sri Lanka while on safari in the land of the Leopards.

Please don’t miss the real time screen shot of the scene in my camera. 😎 How clever am I?

A whole lot of learnings from the coursework came into play for this exercise,  storytelling – the narrative, visual effects of a photograph, photoshop skills, etc. How the visual effect of a photograph changes completely when you introduce other elements into it. How one can change the entire perception and connotations of a visual, came across effectively through this exercise.