11/8/23: Introduction to the montage project. Started to plan out ideas and possible places to shoot images.
11/13/23: Decided to make the theme for my montage ‘Christmas on Main Street’ and mapped out places to stop and take photos. Also thought about time of day and mood of images. Decided on taking them at night (mostly because of the Christmas lights) and made my goal to create a dense montage incorporating many different Christmas assets.
11/15/23: Took many images in North Bethlehem on Main Street. Walked throughout downtown and captured images of storefronts, wreaths, Moravian stars, twinkling lights, and Christmas trees at night. Thought about layout of the collection of images.
11/20/23: Started by editing and looking through all the images to choose one that was interesting for the background but also had enough space for 12 assets to be incorporated. After the below image was decided, I started by going through each photo and choosing different assets to use. Began thinking about where they could live in the photo naturally. (Original background image below)
11/22/23: My theme is dense, so I started building a very busy collage-theme that has many aspects of Christmas and lights throughout. So far, I have made different layer masks and added two Moravian stars, a ribbon, some hanging lights, and a few presents to the background image. Figuring out where they could fit best on the image has been my biggest challenge so far since I really want it to read as naturalistic.
11/27/23: My overall concept for this montage project is Christmas in Bethlehem. My goal was to incorporate many pieces of Bethlehem in an image to portray all the beautiful things that we love about this time of year. Although I would say (apart from the trees), my photo best fits in the naturalistic theme, my approach was truly to make my image dense with lights, trees, and everything Christmas. I would say that each layer incorporated supports this concept. Today I worked on finishing up all the layer masks and incorporating them in the most natural ways. To do this, I also had to make many edits on the contrast, brightness, location, and shadows. Although my theme is dense, it is important to me that the assets still feel like they belong there. So, the last steps of my project (and arguably the most important), was to make lots of small edits to each layer.
