C&N Coursework, Context & Narrative Blog, HNC Photography, Part 1: The Photograph as a document, Project 5: The Manipulated image
Exercise
Instead of using double exposures or printing from double negatives we now have the technology available to us to make these changes in post-production, allowing for quite astonishing results.
Use digital software such as Photoshop to create a composite image which visually appears to be a documentary photograph but which could never actually be.
For this exercise I wanted to put together something simple but eye-catching, I was looking back over some old images and I found a Black & White image of the Utah state capital building and then i started thing how Icould use it for this exercise. This it hit me – Supermoon. Over the last few years, we have been seeming inundated with “once a lifetime” to occasions where the moon will be so close to the earth it will appear huge in the night sky. These once in a lifetime occasions appear to happen every 18 months – we must have short life expectancies these days – and i have been failed to be impressed by any of them. So now is the time to set the record straight and tell the world what I think a supermoon looks like.
The image is simply a composite if my image – which whist shot is daylight was converted to B&W with a red filter effect to darken the sky and layers with an image of the moon taken from the internet. The Moon was cut and masked. Using a white paintbrush the mask was removed as appropriate to reveal the building and create some shading and the bottom the moon to give a feeling of shaddow.
While the idea maybe simplistic it succeed in one this my friends who live behind the Utah State Capital Building did a double take when they first saw it … so it fooled a local, if only briefly.