Photography brings a visual language that is universal in understanding. We must then understand its vocabulary which consists of shapes, textures, patterns, lines, colours, shade of light to dark and sharp to blurry images. Just as we must learn to arrange words in a coherent order in order to make sense when we write or speak, so too must we put visual elements together in an organized manner if our photographs are to convey their meaning clearly and vividly.
Composition means arrangement: the orderly putting together of parts to make a unified whole; composition through a personal, intuitive act. However, there are basic principles that govern the way visual elements behave and interact when you combine them inside the four borders of a photograph. Once we have sharpened our vision and grasped these basic ideas of principles, then we will have the potential for making our photographs more exciting and effective than ever before.
Over the last 2 weeks we have been learning Photoshop. We have learnt how to cut part's out of pictures and stick them onto other pictures, including scaling the image. We were showed how to change the colours of the image to make it look like it is part of the picture. The most advanced piece of Photoshop work we have done so far would be having to create a persons reflection underneath them after they have been edited to make them stand on water. I found this very hard because it took me a while to be work out that we had to copy the image, rotate it, and then use effects to make it look like a reflection. Here is my piece of photoshop work involving a reflection:
Another example is when we cut out the face of the man in the film 'Up' and stuck it on the body of Jet Lee in a poster of 'The Expendables'. We then scaled the face so it was the right size for his body, and rotated it so he was looking straight forward. We then changed the colours and saturation to make it look like it was part of the picture, we also had to make the face black and white as the poster of 'The Expendables' was in black and white. I found using photoshop hard at first because I did not know where to find all the tools, but once I had searched around a bit and got the hang of it, it was fairly easy. I think being able to use photoshop is very important in creating Media Products because it is a quick and efficient way of designing posters or DVD covers.
Here is a piece of work I created when I was playing around with the 'lasso' tool:
