Photographic Study Project

This week’s project was both a challenge and a great amount of fun. Our goal was to discover new perspectives of an everyday object by capturing 12 photographs of our chosen object with different angles, depths, vantage points, and leading lines. I chose a wheelbarrow which has been used by my husband’s family for over 25 years. Its combination of metal and wood and its worn-through colors weren’t something I paid much attention to prior to this project. Now I can’t see it without feeling an incredible attachment to and love for it.

I shot my pictures in the late afternoon light under some trees in our backyard. After choosing my 12 final photographs, I imported them into Photoshop and began the process of editing them. I must say, Photoshop is much less intuitive than Lightroom, and the learning curve is a lot steeper. I was able to blend a wood texture over a front-facing photograph of the wheelbarrow, and also applied a technique for color-matching two of the photographs which had a different lighting tone than the others. I also applied adjustment layers to fix some lighting issues in several photographs. I then created a grid layout in Photoshop to create a collage with some of these images. I selected the images I wanted to use and copied and pasted each photo into the collage file as its own layer. With some hard work and persistence, it turned out to be something I’m very proud of. The rest of the photos from my collection are shown individually below. Click on each image to see it full-sized.

I shared my collage on Facebook with our class group in order to get some feedback prior to submitting my work. Christina Carrick mentioned the blue color used for my text didn’t seem to match the blue in the pictures very closely, so I experimented with the eyedropper tool to get some more turquoise hues like she suggested. In the end, I used a color almost identical to my first choice since it provided a better contrast between the background and font color. Ben Harker suggested that I create more contrast in my blended photograph so it was easier to notice, and suggested using a different font for the collage title; both of these suggestions were implemented.