11/20/23
I have a lot of architecture/ street photography but I want to incorporate a sort of “humanness” in the overall photo as in that there is an abstract aspect of a face. For now I decided to arrange the buildings at the bottom of a “commonwealth” arc that splits the photo in half.
11/27/23
Looked at more inspirations and wanted to take more pictures regarding parts of human bodies like hands and eyes. Started working on removing the background of individual buildings and at first I warped the commonwealth arc into a smile since I wanted to make a face. But then I later thought it would be enough to leave it the way it is. I used a lot of transform abilities such as distort and scale to make the buildings seem believable although they are miniature and taken in different angles.
11/30/23
Took more pictures and decided to also incorporate animals to represent how humans look at other humans sometimes in the “commonwealth”. Starting to put everything together but having trouble seeing how using masks would add to my process and being non-destructive.
12/3/23
Final touches. Arranged the animals in a pattern of domesticated animals vs non-domesticated animals and also focused on the way they walked. The editing techniques I used involved duplicating, cloning, and mostly copying and pasting layers. I want to clear the sky in one of the layers and I managed to do it in the other layer but I forgot how to.
12/4/23
Managed to clear the sky background of the apartment bld layer by deleting the background in the original image and copy and paste onto the main image. Now it is complete. I wanted to go for a more abstract feeling but it ended up being quite odd and interpretive.
Questions:
What is your overall concept and how does each layer support that concept?
I was mostly inspired by Maggie Taylor and wanted to include aspects of absurdity to my photos so that is where the idea with the hands and eyes came in. I also really liked the picture I took of just the words “The Commonwealth” which led me to think what exactly that meant especially nowadays where society in general is so divided. The buildings I took pictures of are products of the commonwealth and the animals represent people of the commonwealth of different varieties. The eyes and hands however represent something similar to a seraphim or biblically accurate angels in which they are looking down on the commonwealth from an omniscient point of view.
Is your approach more formal and abstract, associative and surrealistic, or naturalistic? Why?
I would like it to seem more surrealistic and abstract if possible. I want the viewer to do a double take when they see my montage but of course not everything is perfect due to my lack of photoshop skills. I did try my best to make everything seem in place and give a sense of oddity.