Final Piece

For my final piece, I decided that I was going to use my favourite experimentation and work on it from there to create a unique piece which ties in with the title of this exam unit, Truth, Fantasy, or Fiction. Of all the projects I have done in this unit, by far my favourite had to be shoot 5, the last one I did. I preferred this over the others because it was the one I most enjoyed editing. I knew that my pieces for shoot 5 turned out a little rougher than I had wished, but I knew that with patience and a slow hand I could edit them a lot nicer, even if it took me 20 minutes just to select around my subjects.

I used most of the skills I developed throughout this unit when it came to editing my final piece. Every artist I have researched has had some influence in my photographs, which is something I was worried wouldn't be the case. 

I used the skills I acquired when editing my photos for Claire Brewster and Andreas Lie when it came to doing the double exposure for my final piece. I used Vyacheslav Mischenko's use of vibrant colours to make my subjects stand out more, and the skills I learned whilst editing the photos influenced by Sharon Cummings which are also prominent in my work, as I have used different hues and textures for my subjects. Finally Charlotte Caron has also had an influence on my final piece, in the way that I practiced superimposing my subjects onto different backgrounds and textures. 

Here are my final pieces:

I chose to use the same photos that I used in shoot 5 because I feel that it has a better relation to my initial intention and to my chosen artists. I felt that it would also show more development than if I went out and took some new unseen before pictures. 

I did however use completely different textures for this series, to avoid plagiarism and repetition (seeing as a couple of the textures I had used before were from the Internet). All of which are pictures I have taken myself, in the same location that I took the pictures of the animals from, for instance the sunset was taken up the hill in the field this horse lives in, the three mallard ducks were taken in the same pond as the female duck, and the picture of the European starlings was taken in the sky above the garden in which I took the picture of the blackbird from. 

I wanted to keep the idea of having the animals texture come from their habitat, hence why I took all the pictures in the locations where I found the horse, duck and bird. I decided that for this project, I would keep the rest of the image (such as the wall the bird's perched on, the school the horse is running in and the grass the duck is stood on) to add yet another dimension to my images, this time contrasting between freedom and captivity, in a way. Let me elaborate - the horse is tame an has been broken in. Every time he gets brought in to ride in a way it's as if his freedom is borrowed, he belongs to somebody, he is no longer free in the ways he would be in the wild. In this picture for instance he is being made to canter around in an inclosed space for the purpose of a photo. This is what made me decide that I wanted to use a picture of a sun setting into the horizon as his texture, I wanted it to represent his freedom, cantering off into the sunset, a horizon used to represent the vastness of the wild and how free wild animals truly can be. I also used this in my other two images, the duck for instance was being fed bread by a human, she wasn't out there hunting for her own food, however when in the pond the ducks are more independent and fend for themselves in the wild. The same with the black bird, before the image was taken he hopped off the bird feeder in my garden onto the fence, and I contrasted it by using a picture of the sky with a flock of birds to once again represent freedom. 

I see a parallel between freedom and captivity alongside truth and fantasy. The fantasy being the freedom the animal gets, and the truth being what its life is really like. 

Here are all the original images I used:

Now, why did I choose the place the textures on the image where they are currently placed?

Duck - line created by the three ducks is parallel to the duck's top line, looked more natural this way.

Blackbird - all bird flying towards the same direction the blackbird is facing, also making it look more natural this way. The bird under his eye shows just how closely he is watching their freedom.

Horse - with the horizon a little further down it just didn't look right, it looked as if I had forgotten to add a texture to half of the horse. Positioning it slightly higher up made it stand out a lot more. 

Shooting in RAW vs Shooting in JPEG

There are many advantages to shooting in both formats. For instance shooting in RAW you can get the highest level of quality as it records all the data from the sensor, unlike JPEG which processes the image in the camera, so the white balance the colour saturation etc are already applied to the image before you even get a chance to tamper with it in post production. Also RAW records greater levels of brightness, as it can record between 4,096 to 16,384 different levels, whereas JPEG only records 256. 
Seeing as shooting RAW allows you to gain better detail in your images, you have access to sharpening and noise algorithms in programs such as Adobe Lightroom. However I find that when shooting in RAW I can take far fewer pictures than when shooting in JPEG, because the size of each image is so vast that it takes up a lot of memory on my SDHC Card, which is only 8GB. This is when I find shooting in JPEG so much better, because the file size is so much smaller than a RAW file, so far less storage is needed meaning I can take loads more picture, also due to the smaller size, cameras can write JPEG files much faster than RAW, allowing me to shoot at higher frames per second and for longer periods of time. 
Here is an example of an undoctored image I shot in RAW:
I do absolutely love this image, because I think the Chestnut pony contrasts great against the trees in the background. Though it is a shame that I didn't include the entire woman, the horse was the subject I was mainly focusing on. I feel the colours are rich and vibrant, and the focusing is soft. I never felt the need to edit this picture, as I thought it looked great just the way it came out. 

As you can see this file size for this RAW image is a whopping 9.7mb, taking up an incredible amount of space on my SD Card. 

Here is a JPEG image I have shot using the same camera and lens:
My dilemma is that I feel this image is also very rich and vibrant, although the focusing may be a little less soft. I also didn't feel the need to overly doctor this image, in fact I don't think I've doctored it at all because I was pleased with the way it turned out. As you can see this image only takes up 127kb, which is far smaller than the RAW file, meaning I could have taken so many more shots that day than I could have the day I was a photographer at the New Forest Show. 

So, to conclude, I believe that yes there are far many more advantages to shooting in RAW, but unless you can afford to splash out on a 128GB memory card or two, it's no use for when you want to take a vast amount of pictures. I do believe however that so long as you're thinking about the composition, the lighting, and how you're going to shoot your image, shooting in JPEG should give you some great results.

Playing Around With Different Software

Because I do not have access to Photoshop at home, any editing I want to do has to either be done in GIMP 2.8 and/or Paint and Picasa 3. I only ever use paint for light cropping and pasting print screens in. I use Picasa generally to boost the vibrancy in my pictures and tweak them a little bit, all in preparation for when I want to doctor them in GIMP.

Here is a walkthrough on how I make my images more vibrant and aesthetically pleasing to the eye:
Firstly I open up my image in Picasa 3. I often ignore the first tab and go directly onto the second one (the one with the sun half coloured in). Then I tamper with the bars, sliding them up and monitoring the image. I often slide them too far and then go back, I find this is a good way of getting just the right balance.  I don't often bother with the colour temperature, as once I've fiddled with the Highlights and Shadows my image doesn't need warming or cooling. 

Then, I move on to the next tab along, where I often just use the sharpening tool. For this image I sharpened it until the maximum it could go, as I thought it made the image look far nicer.

As this is quite a simple editing process there's not much else I do in Picasa. I move on to the last tab, where I only tend to use the vignetting tool. I hardly ever go through with it but sometimes I like to see what it would look like with a vignette and I keep it if I like it and it doesn't look too awful.

Here is the original image followed by the one I have just edited in this walkthrough:

A Failed Experiment...

I wanted to photograph more than just your average pet/pond animal, so I asked my friends if they have any kinds of quirky pets I could photograph. Most just had cats and dogs, but my friend Abbie said she had a snake. I went out to her house and we took the snake out of the tank and took it to the bathroom, where we put her in the bathtub and began taking pictures. I have no experience whatsoever when it comes to photographing snakes, and if I'm honest I didn't know what kind of photograph I wanted to achieve at the end either. 
I brought with me my 50mm Nikkor lens, but I had great difficulty focusing it using AF for some reason, which I've experienced with that lens before. I switched it to MF but to no avail. I did manage to snap some pictures, but they weren't good enough in my opinion to do anything with.
The snake wriggled too much, and my lens wasn't focusing enough for me to capture it before it moved, which didn't help either me or my auto-focusing situation. Here are some of the failed pictures I took:

I did however manage to get a couple of good shots, where the snake sat still while and my camera focused on it.

Despite being unhappy with the results of my shoot, we had to end it quicker than wished because the snake begun defecating, and so we had to quickly put her back in the tank so as to not get it all over the nice clean bath... I went home that day and decided I was going to give editing the shots a go. I was still thinking of ideas as to how I could edit it, but I wasn't sure if this was a shoot I was going to follow through with purely because I wasn't happy with the shots. I figured it was worth me at least trying to do something with it, or else it was just a wasted shoot.
I opened up my image manipulation software, and started selecting around the snake. Once I had selected a section of it I went into colours > colourise, and played around with the hues, saturation and vibrancy. I repeated this step a few times, gaining different colours with each step until I got a bit bored of the outcome. 
As you can see it's not one of my best images. I gave up with it before I'd even finished, because I knew I wasn't going to use it as a contribution to my final piece.

I also cropped the image, and played around with the hues again, but I was still unhappy with the results. I thought my editing in this wasn't at all playful, and the outcome of the images is very simplistic and dull.

Here is a contact sheet for this experiment:

Shoot 5 and demonstration of editing process

Lie inspired me to create some work using double exposures, where I would be combining the animal's habitat with the actual animal itself. For this I went out and took some pictures at the duck pond near my house. Sadly there weren't very many that day, but I managed to get a nice picture of one of a female Mallard Duck. The duck was the first image I edited, I chose it because it was quite a simple outline to select and it was going to be a good starting point to practice with. Now because I wanted to edit more than just the one photo, I also used a picture of a black bird that I have used in my previous edits for the work inspired by Charlotte Caron. This photo was also quite simple to work with, the outline of the bird wasn't too tricky to follow and the picture turned out okay in the end. 
I work at a local stable yard in the New Forest, and I decided that after school one day I was going to meet up with my friend whom I work with, and take some pictures of her horse Strider. I met up with her the Monday after college and we brought her horse into the outdoor school and using a lunge whip managed to make him canter around so I could get some action shots. I set my camera to sports mode and using my 50 - 200mm Nikon lens I began taking photos. When it came to editing, the horse was the trickiest by far, seeing as I had to deal with selecting around the mane and tail hair as well as some slightly covered hooves. 
Here are the three original pictures I used:

Here is a walkthrough on how I edited these final pieces using GIMP 2.8 (because over the Easter Holidays I didn't have access to a school Mac where I could use Photoshop), using a picture I took of a mouse last summer as my example:

Free Select Tool

Firstly after opening up the image in GIMP, (which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Project), I duplicated the layer and used the Free Select Tool to begin selecting around my mouse. I have my own Wacom Bamboo Tablet so this is a much easier process than if I were to be using my laptop's mouse.

Mouse after I have completed the selection

Once selected, I used the controls CTRL + C (Mac CMD + C) to copy and CTRL + V (Mac CMD + V) to paste it onto a new layer. I then right clicked and added an Alpha Channel, so that my image would have transparency rather than a solid block of colour as the background. 

After having added the transparency, I went to File > Open As New Layer and selected the image I wanted to use as my background for this project. I just used a picture of my garden seeing as that's where mice live.



Although this isn't always necessary, I wanted to re-scale the image of the garden so I could fit it around my selection. To do this I used the Scaling tool. When the dialog box opens, I made sure that the dimensions were chained by clicking on the little chain picture by them. This means that when I alter one dimension, the other will change size automatically and accordingly to the number I have changed, so that the image will re-scale to the exact same dimensions. 










Once the image has been re-scaled, I make sure that that layer is under the layer of the pasted mouse, and under the layer from which the mouse was cut. This is so when we move on to the next step, you will begin to see what the image will look like as a finished product.

Begin lowering the opacity of the pasted mouse layer. I always make sure I go too far and then work my way up to a preferred opacity. For me this meant decreasing the opacity by 44%. 

Once I've found an opacity I think works well for my image, I replace the original layer the mouse was cut out from for one of a solid colour, I played around with the colours and settled one a greeny-yellow colour for my background. 



After this I needed to crop my image so the mouse wasn't so small on such a big background. I did this by selecting the crop tool and, well, cropping. 


Once I'm happy with the result, I head over to File > Export As... (or Shift + Ctrl + E) and save my picture.

And voilà! Here's the finished product:

Having said that, these are the background textures I used for my actual projects:
For the blackbird:

Unkknown photographer, used from Google Images

 For the horse: 

Picture of me riding on Holm Hill, Brockenhurst, New Forest, 2015

Photo taken by me, North Weirs, Brockenhurst, New Forest, 2016

For the duck:

Unknown photographer, location unknown, taken from Google Images

Using the exact same editing process I demonstrated above, I combined the images together to created some work which was inspired by Andreas Lie.
Here are all the edits I created:

I edited the horse twice. This was because I didn't at all like how that edit turned out in the end. I disliked the fact you couldn't really tell what the background was apart from had you seen the original picture previously, and I also disliked the random horse head on the horse's shoulder. I decided to then re-edit, creating a much better piece in my opinion. At least now you could tell what the background was, and I figured that seeing as the horse is moving, the background flows far nicer with the image than the previous background did. Something quite subtly which I also like is how the shine on the horse's skin looks like a lightning bolt coming down from the sky in the second version. I thought this was quite a sly way of making the two pictures really become one.
Overall I don't think my edits turned out as nice as I thought they would, they didn't really look as realistic as I'd wanted them to, and sadly my editing skills don't quite allow me to make the portraits as breathtaking as I would have loved them to be like those of Lie's. I do however believe that this series of photos I have edited have allowed me to practice toward my final piece, it has taught me a few GIMP skills I wasn't aware of beforehand (because I usually used Photoshop for this kind of editing) such as quick way to resize an image, and a few shortcuts here and there that help me edit a lot quicker than before. I intend on using these skills I have developed when it comes to editing my final piece.

I am aware that these photos are very similar to those of Lie's that I have used as inspiration. I did not intend on copying him at all, but that just seems to be the way the edits worked out. I know that when it comes to editing my final piece, I need to make the edits a lot more my own, rather than so similar to those of my chosen artist.