more feedback..

I found the feedback session this week both very confusing and helpful. Having shown the experiments which are in the previous post, the direction I want to go in was understood, yet wasn't really obvious and definable within my experiments. My class mates and tutor suggested a few different ways I could approach the experimenting stage, things such as backtracking and going back to using a tripod as legs, making the person like a manikin, there were also a few other suggestions as to where I could go with it, but during the session I actually found myself very lost and confused, there were so many different things going through my head and as stupid as it sounds, I was trying to make sense of everything that had just been suggested to me yet I was totally unable to.

I decided to switch off to it for a few hours and stop thinking about it in the hope that I could come up with some ideas for what to do next. Which is exactly what happened, I was able to make total sense of everything that night - I guess my brain was just a bit overloaded with information; even though it didn't seem like much was said.

I also spoke to one of my class mates the next day as she had suggested something to me, yet again I couldn't make full sense of it. Once I had spoken to her about it, everything made total sense and my ideas started to fall into place. The thing that she had suggested was that I could maybe look at using what we see when looking through the view finder of a camera as the eyes of the person within the piece that I was going to produce, making it obvious that what I am trying to show is how we have become so much like cameras, the have become a necessity and they are like our second set of eyes.

Taking all of this advice in I decided to go off and experiment with my ideas a little more... the outcomes that I produce will follow.

experiments..

 

 

From the feedback I got a few weeks ago, where it was suggested that I just went off and did some more experimenting with making people like cameras, I have produced the above experiments. It was suggested that not only should I look at putting camera parts onto people, but also going about it the other way around and placing body parts onto a camera. I experimented with that idea on the first experiment; I thought the outcome was quite interesting and different yet it didn't really work with what I want to show within my work. So I went back to experimenting with different parts of the camera body on people's bodies - shown in five of the experiments above. I feel that the bottom two experiments are the most successful out of the five as I started to get a better direction and found it a bit easier to place the pieces together. However I still feel that there is something missing from them, so it is something that I need to experiment with a lot more.

a bit about my idea...

Like I have mentioned previously I am looking at the way in which cameras have become a big part of out lives, they are used every single day of our lives in one way or another, with things varying from CCTV to studio work, cameras have become a necessity to us, they are like an extension to our own bodies.

"Now, according to Samsung, 2.5 billion people around the globe have a digital camera" - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/magazine-16483509

 (images taken from Google)

I want to focus on how we - as humans, have taken a strong liking to cameras and how they are now such a big part of us, we use cameras for many different reasons, personal photographs of things such as families, parties, and special occasions. For work purposes like studio work, events and landscape photographs are amongst a few. Camera are like our second nature and we rely on them to a certain extent, we use them to capture our memories, to keep them fresh in out minds.

Therefore for this project I am going to look at how cameras have become part of us, using both photographs of people and of cameras, by cut and pasting, blending and merging I intend to produce numerous experiments exploring this theme.

feedback..

A few days ago we had a feedback session in which I explained the ideas that I have so far and the direction in which I want to go in, as well as showing the initial experiments that I have produced exploring these ideas (shown in the post below).

Thankfully people understood the ideas that I had, however I still have a lot of work to do to get to a point where my experiments are successfully enough to portray my idea of how cameras have taken over our bodies and are now like our second set of eyes.

...

Experiments...

So going from the ideas that I have in my head from the bits of research that I have done over the past week I produced two different pieces, one using the cut and paste technique and the other on photoshop so I could start to blend the objects together a bit more making them look like one piece.

Cut and Paste

Photoshop edit

I got some good feedback for these pieces - saying that the direction in which I am going in is good and the initial experiments are effective in showing what I want to show, yet they are still missing something. 

I want to try experimenting with a few different things;

firstly I need to produce a wider variety of experiments exploring the theme. I want to maybe focus more on one are of the body, maybe the face focusing on including some areas of the camera into the face and making the connection that way. Also maybe including human body parts onto a camera and exploring the things I can produce that way. Also taking bigger body parts such as an arm and replacing it with something such as a tripod to see the different variety of experiments that I can produce whilst exploring the idea of how cameras have become such a big part of our lives and how we maybe take them for granted most of the time.

Photoshop tutorial - creating fog

Last week we had to do a little presentation/ demonstration showing others in the class how to do something on Photoshop, the area that I chose to demonstrate was how to add fog to an image making it look misty, below are the stages that I showed people to enable them to understand how to add for to their images;

open the image in Photoshop:

add a new layer and call it 'fog':

go to the filter menu at the top, go down to Render and across to Clouds, selecting the clouds which will add a layer on top of the image:

add a mask layer to the layer named 'Fog':

select the layer type which is set to normal, select the drop down menu and change it to 'screen':

this will remove all of the black areas on the layer labelled 'fog' meaning you can now see the image below.

Make sure that the Mask layer is selected, select the paint brush and make sure that the colour selected is black:

and using the paint brush tool go over the areas of the layer you want to get rid of:

(by changing the colour selection to white you can draw back over areas you remove if you decide you want them back, that is only if you have the mask layer selected)

At the moment the fog looks too fake and just looks stuck on top of the image so to make it look a bit more realistic and natural there are two different things to do.

Make sure the mask layer on the 'fog' layer is still selected, then go to filter, blur, Gaussian blur:

and adjust the dial at the bottom to a point where you want it to be:

then select the filter layer on the layer named 'fog':

then go to filter, blur, motion blur which will add movement to the layer making it blend a little:

and again adjust the dial to a point where you want it to create motion within the layer:

now adding a layer of fog to your image is complete:

Black Mirror series

So over the past few days I have watched the 3 episodes in the Black Mirror series, to be honest I found the whole concept quite strange. Showing us the way in which technology has and probably will advance further within each episode. The amazing things that we would forever think unthinkable, such things that would probably never cross our mind.

Each episode has a totally different meaning behind it, yet still explores the same theme of technological advancement and pushes the boundaries.

The 3rd episode stood out the most to me, mainly because it has a small connection to the thoughts that are going through my head about how cameras have become our 'second' set of eyes. The characters within this episode have chips implanted in their heads and camera's in their eyes, meaning that everything they see is recorded and stored on the chip in their head, they are able to go back and watch what has happened and they have seen thought their eyes, whether it be the day before or a year before - something quite amazing, yet quite weird at the same time. The thought of that one day being actually reality is quite amazing, even though we already have something quite similar with video cameras, the fact that its implanted into your head and is there instantly is a bit strange.