Final Assignment Four Images

All of my final images contain my boyfriend and I standing in a seemingly empty landscape. This required a neutral density filter and a lot of post production! I had to take two photographs; one of the empty landscape using the filter, and one of me or my boyfriend stood in a place. The above photograph is my favourite photograph from the entire assignment. I love the warm colours of the cityscape, and the post-production meant that the water looked like it was captured using a fast shutter speed, but the rest of the cityscape is empty. Here, I used the water from the fast shutter speed shot and blended it over the water from the slow shutter speed shot so it looked like the cityscape was captured naturally.

I originally tried taking one photograph, for two minutes, of my model and the landscape. I featured this in an earlier post, and saw that the outline was blurred because of natural movement and the wind on that day! I have still included a shot from my first shoot, two below from the above shot, because the blur was not that strong, and I thought that the composition was really well executed.

In two of my photographs, there were people who had stayed in the same place for the time I had my shutter open for, so I had to edit them out using the healing brush on replace mode. This was time-consuming but looked effective. 

The shot above was from my original shoot, and required my model to sit still for two minutes so the background had no people left in it. My model was far away, so the blurring didn't really show up, and because he had his head down, it meant that his face was not blurred due to movement of the eyes and natural facial movements. I had to edit out the traffic lights in this shot, as they were too distracting, and also made it look like they were the main purpose of the shot.

I think this photograph is most effective when it comes to discussing editing techniques. I kept my camera at the same distance and focal length, which meant that merging the two images was easier. Also, I was really lucky with the lighting, and they were practically the same. Here, I only had to edit the saturation down to -40 (which I did for all the images) and turn the contrast up to +40, so the photographs looked dramatic and fitted my intentions.

This photograph required the most editing work, as the colours and placement were completely off. I had to change the colour balance to make the photograph of me bluer, and then I could erase the second layer to blend the background in. I had also shot this photograph on a different day, so the placement was off. Therefore, I had to use the 'skew' tool to make sure both shots were aligned correctly.