#recreatingreality

[attractfreedom]

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Same Situation...Different Thinking I heard this story the other day...very powerful. Listen to it and tag someone who needs to hear this.... Your thoughts create your reality. #recreatingreality #attractfreedom #drkenonu #changeyourthinking https://www.instagram.com/p/CEx5qCMJN97/?igshid=jxebdr0b6k03

[jeanhsu2000]

For the final unit and assignment in Digital Imagery, we were required to take a surreal approach in using photoshop, merging photographs together to reflect upon differences we see within our world living in Beijing. In my image, I employed surreal elements from the master photo manipulators Maggie Taylor ( http://www.maggietaylor.com/) and Erik Johansson (http://www.erikjohanssonphoto.com/about/). Johansson merges hundreds of different images together to make it look like it could have been captured in one take. He uses photography as not a way to capture moments, but a way to capture the ideas in his mind.

 Likewise, to create the surreal looking sky, I merged together three different pictures of skies.  Each had a different color scheme, and I blended them together by altering the opacity and blending modes. The dreamlike colors of the sky juxtaposes the subdued blue sky behind it. I also found an image of a clock and blended this into the background along with a candid portrait I took for the Portraits unit. The large scale of the portrait to the miniature scale of the landscape again juxtaposes differences. 

The theme I was trying to convey is that our world largely revolves around time, which is why a clock replaces a sun in the image. The person is placed so that she’s gazing directly at the clock, revealing that she is controlled by time. The bizarre colors of the sky represents a person’s chaotic state of mind as a result of time. Thus, after flattening the layers, I added a black photo filter to the image to make the overall atmosphere more dark and eerie. 

[jeanhsu2000]

Today in class, we continued experimenting with photoshop and its many tools. In this photo, I merged two of the photos I’ve taken this year. One of them is a drawing i did for the Light Painting unit, the other one is a landscape picture I took of my Chinese New Year break. I selected the silhouettes individually from the light painting picture, then pasted them onto the landscape so that it looks like they are standing amidst the flowers. In order to make them blend in more and look more eerie, I decreased the opacity and also adjusted the color balance. 

[jeanhsu2000]

Last class, we started our new unit: Recreating Reality. Most of us were new to photoshop, so we focused on the skill of selecting by creating a melonhead from images of fruits. From this, we learned how to use some of the basic tools of photoshop, and how important the selection process is in the final image. Since the whole point of this unit is the allow people to see reality in new ways, If the selection is not done well, the image produced would look unconvincing.