Week 6

Assignment: Mash-up2, take photos and combine them to convey a message to the audience.

Craft: 

I used photoshop to combine the pictures i took. I used the the lasso tool to cut out ronald mcdonalds face and an overweight guys body and inserted it on to my background of the track in the shannon center. I also used the eraser to clean up the edges around the face and body. Furthermore, i used the scale option to make sure the face and body were porpotional and finished it up with a hue/saturation plus brightness/contrast tool to blend all three pictures together.

Composition:

One thing i didn't incorporate was the guys legs because of the angle i took of the track i would have to erase all the railing bars that were infront of him because i had him leaning on a railing. I am going to fix this up with my final draft by taking a picture of someone overweight actually struggling in running on the track. Also, i'd like to incorporate the American flag and a flag of mcdonalds or such.

Concept:

I had to totally change my original concept, which was to show the presence of poverty in modern society to who really runs America. I am going to convey this message by showing an overweight person running on the track, but struggling. This person is going to have the face of ronald mcdonald. I want him to be maybe dragging the American flag and running with a mcdonalds flag.

Week 5

Assignment: Take 25 pictures of people and places for Mash up project 2.

Craft: I want to take atleast two pictures and combined them together seamlessly to create a picture that depicts a clear message to my audience. I will be doing this combination on photoshop. I will be using such tools as the marquee, lasso, and magic wands to make selections. To transform the picture i will use roation, scale, distort and skew. Further more to make adjustments to the layers or the background i will play around with brightness/contrast and hue/saturation.

Composition: At the time i only have maybe one or two photos i want to use. This weekend is when im going to take most of my pictures for my mash up project. I want to get various homeless people and put them in four different places at Saint Xavier where you could not ignore their presence. This would make poverty a reality to many students and hopefully bring out a positive response of caring and love.

Concept: I want to go downtown and take various picture of homeless people and their living condition. I want to insert these people in various locations on campus, such as our caf, the gym, in class, etc. I want to depict the message that just because homeless people are not present in our everyday life, it is still real and i believe people would care more about this reality if they could see their everyday struggles we take for granted.

Week 4

Assignment: Final Draft of Mash-Up: I selected a picture from the lincoln era and a picture that I took from the modern era to mash together to convey a message.

Craft:

First i selected a picture i took outside of Saint Xavier. Then i copied in Lincoln and two of his friends. After adjusting the

 contrast and cleaning up around t

he edges i realized that nothing really in the picture lead my audience to believe it was in the modern era. So i copied a Saint Xavier sign in and made it read " Lincoln comes to SXU". This allows my audience to fully understand that he is in the modern era and is coming to a college to speak. This was only half of the picture since i did it on tabloid paper and wanted to portray the other side of lincoln. On the other side i used a picture i took in Hawaii as the background. Then i copied Lincoln and his two sons and wife, each seperatly, into the picture. I had to resize each person and adjust there colors and contrast to make it look like they were all the same. Again i didn'd get the feel of modern day so, i copied in a modern day sail boat to put in the ocean behind there family vaction picture. This all took alot of detailed erasing and alot of focus on contrast because in both sides of the picture i wanted to make sure that lincoln was the focus and not the extra things that i copied in the picture.

Compositon:

This time before selecting the two pictures i wanted to mash-up, I thought of a concept i wanted to convey and then wo

uld search for the perfect pictures to help me convey the message. I wanted to portray Lincoln's personality in todays era. I selected a picture i took of Saint xavier and mashed it with a picture of Lincoln and two of his friends and then selected a picture of Hawaii and four seperate pictures of Lincoln, two sons, and his wife.

Concept:

Unlike my first draft this final draft had a strong concept that i believe when people look at my photo can deffinatly understand what i'm trying to say. My overall concept is that if Lincoln was present today, he'd be the same man. He 

would be going to colleges and doing political speeches and expressing his beliefs across the world. On the other hand, he'd still be the family man, who would take his family to Hawaii for a vacation. The only thing i want to improve on my work if that the two pictures actually blend together so it can have the effect that these two pictures are one, just like the two sides of Lincoln (buisness/ political vs. family man) come together to make Lincoln such a great figure in history.

Week 3

Assignment : MASH-UP 1: First Draft. I selected a picture from the lincoln era and a picture that I took from the modern era to mash together to convey a message.

Craft:

First, I selected a picture from lincoln's era of Abraham Lincoln sitting down in a chair. Then i got a picture that i took of my friend Mary . I opened both pictures in photoshop. Then i created a new picture with the dimensions of a regular U.S. letter. I copy and pasted the Lincoln picture into this new picture. Using the transform-scale option i held down shift and expanded the picture to take up the whole page. Then i used the lasso marquee tool to cut around my friends face in order to make it a layer in the picture of Abraham Lincoln. Also, i used the rotate and scale tool again to adjust my friends face to fit on Abraham Lincoln's head perfectly. Then by erasing some of the new layer of my friends face i was able to blend the hair line and beard on my friend's face. Finally, I adjusted the hue/saturation under adjustments for my friends face so that both pictures would match in black in white. Also, brightness contrast helped the two images blend together.

Composition:

I orginally had the idea of putting Abraham Lincoln and two of his friends on the beach in Hawaii. When i began to mash up the picures i wasn't liknig the outcome, so i decided to put my friends face on Mary. At first i thought this wouldn't work out well and was doing it as a joke just to play around with photoshop, but the outcome was pretty good. I liked it so decided to take it seriously and work more indepth with it.

Concept:

Honestly my picture was really lacking a concept and i tried to think of simiarlites shared between Abraham Lincoln and my friend Mary. A few things came to mind, but getting this message across an audience with little knowledge of who Mary is seemed rather pointless. So i decided to rethink a whole new concept then build on the idea with pictures. My new concept is that if Abraham Lincoln was around today, i believe he'd be doing the same things. Such as being very poitical and professional with his entourage and also taking family pictures on vaction.