Experiment: Lost in photography

This experiment is about how we are transported into our screens when we concentrate on them. The idea is that we lose touch of reality by engaging with this type of media by having emotional bonds with the characters becoming one of them. At first, I found it hard to come up with ideas on how to represent us losing ourselves in the media we watch and engage with but then I thought of how we place ourselves in the surroundings of the television and with the characters.
I needed some themes for the media and so I came up with horror films and video games. Here are the photos I need for the horror film:

Here are the photos I will use for the video game which is a shooter:

To do this project, I needed to create lots of different layers to allow all of the subjects and the scenery to work together as one piece. Here are the different layers and how I got them:
Horror:

I needed a spooky place and so I decided on a forest.

I needed the photo of the television on its own layer because I needed to make it the right scale and position which wouldn't have worked if it was on the same layer as the sofa and me.

I had to crop myself and the sofa using the magnetic lasso tool in photoshop, like most of the cropped images.

The wolf's back part of the body and feet were cropped to make it more realistic that it was in the woods. This was difficult because the wolf had to go on the layer on top of the woods. So to crop the wolf, I hid the layer it was on but had it selected so that I could see the tree that the wolf would be standing behind and crop the wolf at the same time. This meant that I could use the lasso tool to go along the exact shape of the tree to cut out the wolf's back part of the body.

Because the TV was at a tilted angle when I took the photo of it and the sofa, I couldn't quite fit the surroundings into the TV exactly, parts of the borders of the TV were bigger than other parts. So to fit it properly, I found the distort tool in photoshop which meant that I could pull the image of the surroundings in different directions to allow me to fit it into the TV screen.
Games:

I needed a wide open space for this image so that I could fit everything in, such as the tank. This meant that I could get things more into scale. However, it meant that the sofa and the TV would be smaller. Becuase I didn't want this to happen, it made me think of how we lose touch of reality and so the image shouldn't be very reallistic meaning the scales would be unrealistic.

The TV is at an awkward angle, but this time on purpose because I needed the TV to be at the same angle as the sofa to make it look as if I am looking at it which meant that the bottom of the TV wasn't in line with the surroundings but this emphasises the meaning of losing touch with realitiy because the TV is at the center of the collage and so people will look at it first.

The soldier is very small because his surroundings are much bigger and so I had to get him to scale with the things around him. I cropped the soldier's feet to make it look as if he really was there in the grass. I wanted to make some parts of the collage realistic.

The photo of me was hard to crop because there are lots of rough edges. To crop myself and the sofa, I zoomed in very close in the image and used the magnetic lasso tool which worked well because the edges became smoother the closer I zoomed in.

The image of the plane had a different shade of blue around it which didn't match the surrounding sky. This meant that I had to get rid of it which was hard because the plane has lots of parts attached to the wings. So to get rid of the sky around the plane, I used the rubber tool in photoshop when I was zoomed into the image of the plane. I used a small diameter so that I could get rid of the small spaces in between the smaller parts of the plane.

The tank was the hardest piece to scale because it is the biggest thing to go into the photo but I didn't want it to be so big that it couldn't fit the collage and so that it didn't have to be far away. I solved this by moving it to very right of the photo so that it was big and it was close to the TV and the sofa which made it look bigger. The shadow underneatht the tank caused a problem because I didn't know wether to cut it out because I didn't know where the bottom of the tank was. For this reason I kept the shadow.

Using the distort tool in photoshop allowed me to fit the picture of the scenery into the television so that it filled the screen and made it look realistic that it was on the TV. You can see in this layer above that the corners aren't all 90 degrees.
To make the layers all fit together, I had to crop most of the images to remove their original backgrounds and to fit their new surroundings.
Here are my final pieces:

As you can see, the image of the surroundings is exactly the same in the image of the television, apart from the sofa and the person. This is to make it feel as thought the person is in their television when they are watching the horror film or playing the video game. I wanted the collages to look a bit unrealistic to show how when we get involved in this type of photography we lose touch of reality. I enjoyed doing this experiment because it made me realise how we are taken into the television when we watch a programme or play a game and how we aren't aware of what is going on around us at the time when we watch or play.

Because the collage is so surreal, I wanted to see what it would look like if I made it look more realistic.

To do this, I made everything smaller so that they would work better with their surroundings becuase the surroundings are a big space which means the subjects in that space will be small to make them look realistic.



Experiment: To be, but not to be

In the first part of my experiment, I wanted to look at how we can see places artificially when we have never been there before.

Using photography, we can see landmarks such as the Eiffel tower in France without having to go to France, but by staying in the comfort of our own homes.

Through photography, we can see animals that are far away from us without going to that place to see them, for example this polar bear.

When looking at this photo, we can also be transported to the time period of when the photo was taken. By doing this, that time period is forever kept and recorded for ever so that anyone can see it.
The first experiment led me to look at how media can transport us into a place where we are not, in the screens of a television or computer. Using photography, we can place someone somewhere they have never been but make it look like they are there.
So for my experiment on this theme, I needed to have photos of places and photos of me so that I can place myself where I have never been before, here are the photos I will use:

To put myself in different photos, I needed to crop myself out of the photo above and put it on the top layer.

I would then need to put the photo of the place I wanted to put myself in on the bottom layer and position myself in the photo. For example on the moon:

I then put the picture of me to scale to make it look as if I am standing on the moon using the surroundings, for example I used the astronaut and the flag to decide where in the photo I stand and how tall I need to be in the photo. Here are the images of me in different places:

This experiment shows how it can appear that I am in these photos at the place and time when they were taken but really I wasn't. Through photography, I can make people believe that I was there, when I wasn't.

Sarah Craig

Sarah Craig is a photographer who goes to places and then takes photos of the things she sees on the journies that she takes through that place. She has done this with a lot of places, for example Herm Island:




Another journey she took was around Goyt Valley:




I like her work because when she takes the photos of a place, she really explores it to capture the true essence of where she has been. Most of her work is landscape and when we view these photos, we ourselves our taken to where she has been because we can see these amazing sights without having to be there.
Everytime we see a landscape photo, we are taken to that place.

Stephen Gill

Outside In.
In this project he used a box camera. He would then go on a journey, find small things and put them inside his camera. He would then take a photo of the things inside his camera and something in the background of where he found them.








This project shows us a new way of describing a journey. We never stop to think what can be found on a journey and so Stephen Gill is taking a different view to photography on journies. This work has inspired me to see how we involve ouselves in jounrnies in different ways, for example a journey into media and a journey into screens.

Buried

In this project Stephen takes a picture of a place and then he digs a hole at that place and buries the picture. After a week or so he would come back to the spot, dig and find the picture again to see how it came back.








Some of the photos were effected more than others. Weathering could have effected the photo a lot making a big impact on the photograph. However, the photo could be ruined by the soil and weather because it could cover up the actual picture and so we couldn't see the picture taking away the effect of the picture.
In this project, it is that actual photograph itself that has taken the journey and we get to see the results of this. I like this idea because the picture will have the same texture of the place that was photographed. The paper the photograph is on will have the same effect of the photograph. It is like the photograph has gone on the same journey through time as the area.
This project has taught me how photographs can really capture journies by creating layers which help to make the images more 3 Dimensional.

Experiment: Trapped

In this experiment, I looked at how photography can transport us into our televisions, computers or onto paper. When this happens, it looks like we are trapped inside of the photo.
Firstly I startd to look at the main theme of trapped, here are some photos that I took relating to this theme.

To take this experiment further, I wanted to actually trap myself in a screen and so I took some photos of some screens:

I then needed to edit theese screens to put myself in them. To do this, I created 3 layers. The bottom layer was me. The next was the screen with the inside of the screen gone so that I am seen. The top layer is the inside of the screen but with a low opacity so that I can be seen so that it looks more like I am in the screen:

When looking at these photos, I looked at the surroundings of the screens and thought they weren't appropriate. Becuase of this, I wanted to get the surroundings of the screen as part of the photos aswell. So I started working on how I could improve the surroundings and decided I could make another layer. Here are the photos I took:

These photos are very dark and so I had to make them brighter using photoshop. To put the photos of me being trapped by the screen, I needed to cut out the screen. These would be the top layer:

The photos of me trapped go into the white part of the screen:

 I like this photo because it is as if the person holding the screen is looking back at the time when they were trapped which leaves the viewer thinking of a story behind the how that person got out of the screen to then hold it.

 In this photo, the screen is tilted at an angle which makes it look like the person has to be the same way up as the screen and that the person holding the screen is in total control of the person inside the screen.

This photo is good because the fingers go over the screen to make it more realistic that the person is holding the screen. It was hard to crop around the fingers but to do this, I used the rubber tool and zoomed into the image so that I could be more careful when rubbing out around the fingers.
I like the layered effect that these images have because of the two people wearing the same clothes and the person is the same. Because of this and the background being the same in both photos, it made it look as if the person holding the screen is trapped aswell which lead me to make another layer:

I enjoyed doing this project because I liked looking at how we  can be in two places at once using photography and how media can make it look as if we are in the screens of our TVs or our computers.