Digital Imagery - Montage

At the moment I am posting a lot of digital imagery blogs, due to the fact that they are all part of an assignment that I have been set, which is due in this week. One of the last imagery techniques that I am going to blog about is called, 'Montage'. I had never actually used montage before, as it is definitely more of a graphic design type of technique that is used, but I was very excited to get going with it to see what I could produce in a small amount of time.

Our task was to produce a triathlon poster that consisted of the three spots involved within a triathlon, swim, cycle and run. I'm quite a big sports fan so I wanted to use images that stood out for me and that would best represent the triathlon. The process of placing the images and fading them out to merge within the image was a challenge as I didn't want the three images to overlap too much, so I re-sized them and placed them all towards the centre which worked well. Because the background was blue, from using the swimming image as the main background, I wanted to incorporate blue into the other images to bring all the elements of the poster together as one.

 

 

My poster is below

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am really pleased with my final outcome and I feel I have produced a poster that promotes the triathlon aswell as showing the work and the specific techniques that have gone into creating a poster like this. I have always loved the art and design side of photography or other creative means, which I put into practice here to produce a poster that incorporates montage in my own individual way.

Spring Time

As spring has now arrived, I thought I'd photograph something that represents spring to us all.

Flowers!

Now that winter is leaving us, flowers start to appear everywhere, especially around my house. I have a beautiful blossom tree that grows in my front garden, and this year its grown a month early, aswell as some tulips that have grown underneath! So I thought id take the opportunity in taking my camera out the house with me and photographing these lovely flowers before they start to disappear... and whilst the sun is still shining!

I used my Nikon with just my kit lens (18-55) for these images, as that was what worked best for me and I felt I got the best images from shooting with this specific lens. Below are some of my favourite images that include both detail and colour, aswell as natural lighting and depth of field.

 

 

 

Digital Imaging - Pseudo HDR

After creating my HDR (High Dynamic Range) images, we were also told to look at Pseudo HDR, which i guess in a way, is the cheat version of HDR photography. HDR is the technique of using various images to produce one final outcome with 1 underexposed image, one normal exposed image and one over exposed image. Although this is only limited to 3 frames, you are able to use as many frames as you want to get the desired outcome. Comparing this to Pseudo HDR, which is the technique of using just one image or frame and creating HDR within it. So in other words, Pseudo HDR is the easy way of creating a HDR effect..!!

I have already created my HDR images for that specific technique and weekly task, so I thought it was time I tried out just using Pseudo HDR to see the difference in effect on the image and if it worked just as well if I were to use 3 frames, rather than just the 1.


The image below is my original image, taken by using just the natural light, at 400 ISO and F11 and the aperture at 4.2. I shot in RAW to capture the detail within the landscape and environment around it, to give it a clear, crisp image and so I had a lot to work with when creating a Pseudo HDR image. I really like the way this image as come out, it makes a nice image of its own, but lacks colour and contrast aswell as some of the detail that needs to be recovered.

If we compare the original image to the one below, there is a lot of difference. Below is my edited Pseudo HDR image. I have purposely edited this to quite a large extent to show you what Pseudo HDR can do to an image of just one single frame. I popped this image into Photoshop and started to create my HDR image using specific techniques to make it look the way it does. I used specific techniques such as increasing the contrast, brightness and saturation to remove the dullness of the image. I then used levels and  highlight and shadow recovery with increasing the midtones of the image slightly to recover as much detail as possible lost in the original image and really make each part of the image stand out.

I am so pleased with how my final image looks and its amazing what you can do to an image by using just one single frame. This image could pass as a normal HDR image with the merging of many images, rather than the cheat way of Pseudo HDR!