journeys of a starting photographer

they say that once you've learned the rules of your trade, it's time to break it. after all, nothing new can be discovered by just playing by the rules, right?

i'm not a very good graphic designer, and i've always preferred not to edit any of my photos to preserve their original form, the original beauty of the subject. after all, you don't take a photo of something ordinary and then make it extraordinary in post-production. unless that was the point from the beginning.

but now, i've begun my experiments.

last saturday, i had a shoot with some friends where i already had a concept in mind: take good photos and make them better through photoshop. i wouldn't say i actually took good photos, i'm not that much of a narcissist, but i think i did all right.

now i started editing the simple photos. or rather, i started cropping the simple photos. the ones i don't need to edit at all. just to get my bearings with photoshop. get warmed up.



with the first photo, it was more of fitting the photo in a given dimension. it was all about framing, getting enough of the subject in without cropping too much out. and i think i did all right with this one.

and then i followed with simple touch-ups--like extending the background, like so:



because we were trying to get the right "flight" of the scarf, i had to take a wide shot of the model. and when it finally came to cropping, i chose to crop out the a lot of the model's body to give more emphasis to the face--and the scarf. because of this, the top part of the photo came up short and had to be extended.

the trick i employed was something i learned from one of my officemates. get the size of the area you need to fill out, layer by copy from the area you wish to extend, and then invert it. voila! instant extension without the hassles of cloning!

now that i'm all warmed up, i put my focus on the main project:



this was the main concept we were working with last saturday. but because we lacked a big one-toned wall, we made do with the driveway--and had our model slide and run over and over. well, over and over until we had the shots we needed. our model was very game, thank goodness.

this photo has three main layers, which shows our model in three acts of movement. i chose the last "act" to be the main focus and picked two photos that would serve as the imprints he left behind.

initially, the plan was to make all imprints have the same opacity. but the movement would be more noticeable if the imprints were fading one after the other. so i ended up with six layers, all of which are set with different opacity and different filters.

i think i accomplished what i wanted to accomplish.