Surreal Photo Assignment

My idea for the surreal photo assignment is based on toys.  This idea came to me during a class discussion about the Feed the Baby art project.  When my boys were smaller they loved playing with Hot Wheels and action figures.  I am going to try to shoot toys and kids so that real cars become toys and the kids are the same size as the action figures.  A child’s fantasy is to be an action figure and have all the equipment that comes with the GI Joes or the Ghostbusters, isn’t it?

Here is my final Surreal Photo:

Panorama

I took 10 pictures at the Del Amo Mall with the intention of making a panorama.  However, the pictures were not taken from a single vantage point.  I moved down one side of the upper balcony while shooting the opposite side.  In other words, I moved parallel to the subject matter.  I thought it would make an interesting picture (and it did), but technically it was a nightmare to get the photos to blend together. 

After spending way too much time working on this, I took photos of Catalina Island from a friend’s deck in San Pedro.  I thought that more pictures are better than fewer pictures when making a panorama, so I used 7 photos for the Catalina panorama.  It seems that with all the horizontal lines this should have been a snap for Photoshop and it should look better technically than the mall photo.  The photo merge only knit three of the photos together and I did the rest by placing and transforming them.  Not so easy.  This panorama came out better than the mall but it looks sort of like one of those “wish you were here” postcards.

Four Photos, Print Three, One Black & White

These are the four photos before editing:

The picture of the dog was an attempt to have objects at different distances to show depth.  I was standing at an angle to the corner of the room, trying to make the room look bigger than it is.  This is the photo that I converted to black and white because it reminded me somewhat of the “artist a day” photos that I talked about below.  I edited this photo by smoothing out the “cottage cheese” ceiling in the room as well as a few other things.  I wish I could change the ceiling in my house so easily.

The car photo interested me because of the squiggle of light coming off of the hubcaps.  I blurred out the fence so it would not interfere with the car and the motion.

 The koi fish picture was an experiment to see what would happen if I focused on a slow moving object that was mostly in the dark.  I did not edit this picture at all.  After it was printed I wished I had taken out the white spot to the left of the fish. 

The picture of the pine tree was taken on a recent hike on Mt. Baldy.  I was very close to the tree and there was a mountain in the background.  I wanted to see what would be in focus.  I played with the color on this picture, making the greens more vibrant and the sky darker blue.  I liked this picture better than the car photo; however, upon seeing the four printed pictures as a group, this one didn’t fit as well.