Tuesday 28 September 2010

Photography Composition and Image Manipulation

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.

In Photoshop, we learnt how to manipulate images to create new posters. Originally, we were given a series of film posters to play around with including Cloverfield, 30 Days of Night, Easy Rider, The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Crank. We learnt how to cut and paste images into others, create new layers in photoshop document and how to use the clone tool. We were also taught how to change the colour of a layer of image so that it would match with the rest of the image, therefore creating a seamless transition between the new layer and the background. Our task was then to take the poster for the film Cloverfield and to edit out all of the writing, insert a person from another poster so that they would match the colours of Cloverfield and finally, create a reflection of them in the water. I chose a lady from the Bad Boys poster and edited her into the Cloverfield poster.


I found using photoshop easy as the tools are logical and pretty straight forward. It is also useful for desgining posters and other media products for this reason and is ideal for making things such as DVD covers.

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