COMPOSITE LANDSCAPE ASSIGNMENT
To create my image I did a combination of the four pictures above. By using the rule of thirds I decided that the landscape would make up one third and the sky would take up two thirds. I cropped my city scape (which was taken at a birds eye view to give the effect of height) and then I used the magic wand to cut out a reasonable amount onto my background (which was the sky) The sky was interesting to me because the lighting was random. It was an image taken by NASA's Hubble telescope so it is actually a picture of outer space not just the night sky. Since the Empire State Building was my focus on the landscape I wanted to direct the eye to it in a way that the whole picture could be seen so in order to guide the eye I thought about lines. While thinking of lines I came up with the very literal idea of a tight rope line. Since the eye goes to the brightest part of a picture first, or the part with the largest amount of light i placed the rope diagonally across my picture because the largest amount of light was in the star clusters in the sky. The rope led the eye from that cluster of stars to the building. This allowed the entire picture to be taken in without loosing the focal point. The image felt a little empty so I added a raven, by cutting it out and pasting it like I previously did with all the other images I managed to fill the gap. This also allowed me to cover some of the brightness on the section of rope covering the building, I found this section distracting and it took away from the over all effect by not allowing the images to merge( This took quite a bit of tilting) . In order to make everything flow nicely I converted each layer to black and white. The reason I did each layer independently instead of just merging it all together to make it easier and faster is so that I could adjust the lighting, contrast, hue, saturation, and sharpness of each photo so that the over all composition blended.My picture can be interpreted in various ways but the message i intend to give is that every goal has a path to take to obtain, it may be a difficult path with obsticals but once you find the right bath the goal becomes more clear. The path is the rope the obstical is the raven and also the height of the rope, the goal is the building, it is the "empire" state building, achieving an empire is every great leaders goal so the building seemed fit. The fact that the building was almost illuminated represented the clarity of the goal at the end of the path. To sum it all up "Life's 'Tuff"
To create my Filtered version i took the following steps:
- Film grain
- Merge all layers except raven
- Adjust brightness an contrast 30%
- Adjust Hugh
- Adjust saturation
- Apply solarize
- Lens flare to create the circle beam on top of building and use the ripple effect to create vibration look
- Invert raven to white
- color in turquoise
- Invert again
- Adjust shadow and highlights
- Plastic wrap
- Go back to merged layers adjust saturation again
- Merge raven to merged layers
- Adjust contrast
- Apply film grain again
- Adjust color tone and temp
