Composition

Composition describes the arrangement and placement of relative objects in a photo of piece of art. It is a key aspect of any type of art.  A good composition is one that has that right balance of elements or objects. For example, too few elements can be bad because it robs the work of art of necessary detail that makes correct interpretation possible. It also ruins the balance of an image. And too many elements can be very distracting as well and be confusing for the audiences to view the piece of art. Good composition requires good balance. It is best to make sure all the elements present are necessary for the idea or story you are trying to pass on.

I really liked the composition of this image and how the objects are symmetrical on both sides of the image. I want my image to be in the centre of the image making it symmetrical.

Image Manipulation Techniques

In class we were taught many different photoshop tools and techniques to create a ‘photo real’ image that portrayed a meaning. Most of us had not used photoshop because and because I was very unexperienced with this software I had to learn all of these tools from scratch. Some of the tools I used to manipulate my photo were:

Quick Selection Tool: The quick selection tool is what I used to cut out the girl in my image. I want to place her in front of the beach so I had to use this tool to neatly take away the original background.

Brightness/Contrast: This tool was what I used on my original images to both adjust the brightness of the image and to make my image look more appealing to the audience. I used this on my background image of the beach to bring down the brightness to make it look like a very dark and dull day. I then used the contrast tool to bring up the contrast to make it a bit more enhanced and make the colours bolder so that it caught the eye of my audience.

Drop Shadows: Because our assignment was to create a ‘photo-real’ image, I thought that using a drop shadow was necessary in order to make the girl look like she was actually in the image. By adding a drop shadow to her layer it made her look less abstract and less obvious that she was cut out and place in front of the beach background.

Visual Communication Examples

When first starting this assignment the first research I did was look at examples of photo manipulation and photos that expressed effective use of visual communication. My first point of call was Pinterest. I have also loved Pinterest and use it almost daily. I found many photos that inspired me but there were a few that i thought really effectively expressed visual communication and gave me many ideas for my final image. These images below are ones that I though were really creative and really portrayed a message while at the same time still looking real. The light bulb image inspired my image a lot as I originally planned on using it even though I recently decided that my final product wouldn’t use it. I also really liked how the second image played around with the opacity. I originally wanted the water in the background of my image to be a lower opacity then the girl in the foreground but in the end decided that it was not clear what the water was when the opacity was down.

Tackling the Brief

This is the set of steps I will use to brainstorm, research and create my final image.

Inspiration

I used Pinterest to find these images that have inspired the sort of look I want to base my image on.