Practicing Stop Motion

Last week we had a go at trying stop motion for ourselves.
On Premiere we set up a new file and created it in the D drive. On the the capture selection, instead of capturing film, we clicked on stop motion. In this, the computer allows you to use the camera directly with the computer. We set up our scene with a toy bus and some paper clips, set the camera on the tripod and made sure the camera wasn't going to move.
Each time we clicked grab frame it took a picture, and gave a ghosted effect of the last image as well as what the camera currently sees, thus allowing you to see how much to move the objects. We made the bus smash through a load of paper clips by gradually grabbing new frames and moving the bus and paper clips slightly each time.
Once the capture was done, Premiere gives you the opportunity to make it into a small video clip for use on the Premiere timeline, or you can keep it as a series of pictures.

Stop Motion Animation

This video involved 1500 hours of moving lego bricks into the right positions and taking loads of pictures of them. This video is very entertaining and most of it its hard to believe that it really is lego being moved around as it appears like CGI in some parts and like real time movement in others.

Monty Python Animation

Monty Python Animation

I have just been looking at Monty Python Animation on youtube to get an idea of the type of things I could do with stop motion. I found some of the videos a bit boring as it consisted of only a few movements which were repeated.
Other videos I found quite entertaining, you could see how they were made using lots of pictures edited together in stages to create a stop motion film. I particularly liked one where a man was being pumped up before he exploded and then you see his head falling back down.

I have learnt, from watching these that it would be a very good idea when I take the pictures of my props etc that I take lots of different angles and if its a person or animal or such like that I get pictures of them in different positions.

Photomontage.

Here is another of my photomontage images.

In this one I started off using my image of a bus and its surroundings. The first thing I did was use the clone tool to remove a lamp post and to get rid of the "bus stop" markings on the road. I then used the magic wand tool to cut out the jet and stick it in, using transform to position it and resize it as I needed to. I then used the magnetic lasso tool at a tollerance of 2% to cut out the spitfires, again using transform to position and size as I needed. The next thing I did was used the polyganol lasso tool to cut out the bins, unfortunately these were low resolution images so dont look as good. I was struggling to find any other images that I could use on my memory stick so I cut out the picture of a man using a snow machine and put him on the edge of the road.

Photomontage

My Joiner will go on this post once I have finished editing it again in photoshop as what I took to be a joiner was not right.

My own composition image.

Here is my compostion image. I have taken a picture that I am very pleased with and i have used photoshop to add two seagulls.

Here are the two images that I started with. I wanted to use the magic wand tool to pick up the seagull but it picked up the colours from the ground as well, so i used the brush tool set to clear to get rid of the background, leaving only the seagull and then did copy and paste to put the seagull onto the background image, i did this twice. I then did ctrl+t to use the transform tool to adjust the size and rotation of the seagulls to make them blend in.

Levels

In Photoshop you can use levels to improve your image, this can be used to correct a photograph that you really like that you feel needs a bit of tweaking to make it perfect.
If a photograph is over exposed/under exposed then you can use the adjustment layer on the layers palette to work with levels to fix it. The Histogram will show you the amounts of light and dark to show you whether you have over/under exposed, from here you can adjust the amount of light or dark by moving the arrows along the bottom of the histogram to make the image look a bit better.
You can use the magic wand tool to select different sections of the image, if you have done this correctly you will see the marching ants around the area you selected, from here you can repeat the process to work it on a smaller section of the photograph.

You can also use the levels pallette to adjust hue/saturation, this will make colours on the image look better. By increasing saturation, you will fill the pixels with a much denser colour, making it possibly fuller, however it is a way of exposing weak detail in a photograph. By decreasing saturation you can make the image seem more grainy or if done correctly can give the image a sense of a coloured wash.

If your photograph has a lead-in line, it can be made to give the image more impact by using the hue/saturation tool to make it stand out more, a dusty road for example can be made more impactful by giving it a deeper tone, this can be done in hue/saturation or by adjusting the area's tonal range.

Contrast is also a good way of improving an image, you can make lighter colours blend or clash by adjusting the contrast. This can make things like greens and oranges have a greater, fuller effect in creating the difference between a simplistic and an artist photograph.

Cropping Tool

In Adobe Photoshop you can use the cropping tool for a multitude of reasons. The primary reason for cropping an image is to get ride of any unwanted details of a photograph or to take away an actual section, perhaps from a side or the top etc. By cropping an image, you can remove things like someone's head in the corner of the screen as they walked past you.

When using the cropping tool you need to bare in mind the shape and size of the image that you are finishing with. If you are cropping a whole image then you need to think about whether your image is going to be printed the correct size and shape for what you are working with. If you start with an image that would print 6"X4" and you crop a bit off, if you do not do so evenly then printing on that size paper would mean a section of print is unused. This may not be the effect you desire and could ruin an image, thus thought is required in this process.

You can also use the cropping tool for compositing images, you may not want to put the whole of a photo onto another one, you may just want a small section of it, so the cropping tool will help you to use the right section and create a better result for you.

Photomontage

Photomontage is the art of having a photograph made of more than one image. There are various methods of doing so. Digitally these are more common in the 21st century, they are simple to create yet take great skill to give the impression desired of the top artist.
Some people will just use a photo editing programme to lay lots of images together.
Some people will physically make a collage of images and take a photo of that.
Others will simply add one or two things to enhance an image, to add something that was not possible when the original shot was taken.
Others will work with a single image and make a collage of it to represent ideas of damage or confusion, depending on how the montage is composed.

You can use photomontage to represent all sorts of things in the media and photographic world. You can simply create collages for magazines. Enhance images for posters, for example to place an artist with a smart car in a nice location. To give a more artist effect, to obtain the viewers gaze and allow for a possible important message to be portrayed.

Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler is an American artist who is primarily better celebrated for her work in traditional art than in photography.

In Rosler's photomontage work she is renowned for taking a background and adding lots of things to it that do not belong. Here are two examples, the first one she found her background image and used lots of images of a sportsperson in different positions and then added them to the background to make it look like a display of activity in the location.

The second image is in a plain background and Rosler has added scenery and props, as well as inserted a woman and copied the image of her to make it look like a staggered effect. The image gives the impression of an abstract gallery.

David Hockney

Born in England in 1937, David Hockney is a well known painter, stage designer and photographer among many other trades. He is celebrated for his contribution to the "pop art" movement of the 1960s.

His work in Photocollage often involved using polaroid pictures or small photo-lab prints of a subject and placing them together like a collage to create a bigger image. He called these photographs "joiners".

Hockney liked this work more than what he saw from other photographers of the time, they were using wide-angled lenses which he felt gave a distorted image. Therefore making grid pictures gave a wider picture by using multiple standard pictures to create a clean finished image.

Here you can see the photographers impression of movement in the swimming pool as the multiple pictures cut together make it look like the swimmers are moving around the image.

The second image is lots of pictures of the same area taken and joined together to give a checkered image that represents one jigsaw photo.

Hannah Hoch

Hannah Hoch was a German artist, who lived 1889 to 1978. She was best known as one of the originators of photomontage. Her main themes were same sex couples 1926-35 and women 1963-73. A point that is raised among the majority of her work is that she uses photomontage to point out the faults in beauty culture. She contributed to the feminist Dada movement, being renowned for being able to provide food and water despite a shortage of money.

You can see from the images that she uses a dull colour that is similar to that of old newspapers. This colour appears as a wash across the image. An old feeling is given to the montage as it has the aged quality to it. The second image has empty space around the edges, this gives a feeling of 3D to the image as though the montage stands on top of another layer.

Plane picture.

This is my compositing picture in which I placed an image of a plane onto another background and tried to make it look as if it is flying.

I used the magic wand tool to remove the plane from the white background, by using the lasso tool I was able to ensure that I had got all of the picture and not missed any bits. I then folowed this with the feather feature to remove 0.5 pixels to shave a tiny amount from the plane to make sure I didnt take any white background with it.

I pasted the plane onto the background image and used the move tool to place the plane exactly where I wanted it and resized it to make it look further away. I used the motion blur tool on a copied layer of the plane to make it look like it was moving, then I erased the blur on the front of the plane so that it looks like it was gliding through the air. I also blured the background to make it look like a panning shot and put extra blur on the rock to overexagerate the focus on the plane.

Filters

In this image I used the filter that increased the graininess to 6 and the brightness to 10. This allowed the the light to be drawn out and the colours were stretched. This either gives the impression that the image was poorly taken or it has been adjusted after shooting, here it is made to look like it has been sorted after, a comment was made that it looks like a film scene of a nuclear bomb.

This image was adjusted using the spherize filter and worked to -100 so that the camera looks like its in the middle of a sphere and the image is printed on the inside. This gives the impression that a special type of lense was used or that the train is going fast round a corner.

Filters

Here is my image that I altered by using the mosaic tile filter, I set the tile size to 100 and the Grout width to 6, then I made the Grout lightness to 1 to make the tiles really stand out over the image. This filter gives the image a broken up feel and also destorts the flow of the picture, the line that the eye would normally take across the picture is disrupted by the tiled effect.

This time I used the Chalk and Charcoal filter on my photograph, it enhances the light in my picture by working in black and white and showing the balances of light throughout the image. I set the Chalk effect to 5 and the Charcoal effect to 5. By using this filter it gives a greater sense of depth to the image and makes it feel old and artistic, rather than a modern photograph of a historic scene.

David LaChappelle

This image is very vibrant in colour. This is a shot of an implied nude female in perhaps a sensual pose, there is use of shadow throughout the image, a sense of seasonal change is given. The skin is shown with little defect, a good colour tone and very enigmatic. The grass is a plush green and the flowers carry a variety of light colours, the background has a deep blue that also has a lighter wash towards the horizon, the landscape in the background is shown to be in shadow. This image shows a model ina USA flag bikini in a promiscuous pose, her hair billowing in artificial wind and her body in a curved position, connoting the flowing lines of the female body. She is placed infront of the USA flag, which is digitally added to the background of the photograph. The colours in the digitally screwed up flag relate to the colours of the model's clothing. The skin colour stays similar all along the body, symbolising the model is not partially tanned, her hair is a darker shade of the colour of her skin which takes away the dismemberment often shown in the representation of women.

This is a digitally enhanced photograph. The model, in her bed clothing looks like she is standing in the foreground of this image. If you look closely you can see that she is actually laying down and what you take to be the back of her coat is actually the bed covers, you can also see the pillow behind her head. The background is added in of a building that is seemingly damaged, there are broken objects throughout the midground. The sky is typical of LaChappelle in that it has a light blue wash.

David LaChappelle is a photographer and a film director who works mostly in fashion, advertising, fine art photography and is noted for his surreal nature and colour in photography.

LaChappelle has directed many music videos and also some television adverts. He is known for many of his surreal photographs of celebrities.

Colour Variations

This is a print screen that shows me using colour variations. To get to this function, you click on Enhance and then Colour in the drop down box, from there you click on colour variations. In this section, you are given two copies of the photograph, the left hand side is the original image before you used colour variations. The right hand side shows the effects of what you are doing. You have the options of Increase/Decrease Red and so on for Green, Blue and Yellow. You can keep clicking on different buttons to get different shades of colours and effects, its not just more red, less red. You can actually go into all sorts of shades of colour by mixing up the different primary colours.

This time I used Enhance, colour, colour variations.

Warming up the shot.

My next task with this image was to warm up the shot. I did this my using the Orange Photo Filter and set it at 80% Brightness. This created an orange wash over the photograph and made it a more appealing image to look at, it increases the depth of the green so that it no longer looks so cold and also in my view makes it look less grainy. The steam from the engine is made marginaly darker with a hint of orange to it which makes it looks like a warm summers day. It also enhances the lettering on the side of the engine.

Colourized Inverted Image

Inverted Image with High Saturation

Here is the original photograph of a steam train running down the line through the woodlands. It was taken very quickly, as I had only a moments warning that it was coming. I ran across to an open area of trees so that I could get to it with as clear a shot as possible. This train was going downhill so it wasn't working hard so I didnt get a shot of lots of steam. The train was coming at approx. 50mph so I was very pleased to get such a clear image.

Here I used the Invert tool to swap the colours around. I then put the saturation levels right up to get this effect. To me it gives the feeling of warmth. The hot engine has darker colours and the steam is given a colour that to me represents heat and power. The colder surroundings are blue which gives the feeling of cold shrubery. If i saw this image in a gallery, I would say it was created to represent a sense of atmosphere and feeling that the train has a purpose steaming through its surroundings.

Monochrome Image

This is my photograph which I used the invert tool in Photoshop to reverse the colours. I also went on hue/saturation and put the saturation to zero to make it black and white. It now looks like a negative, or perhaps a digital photogram.

This image is one that I am very pleased with. I have kept a copy of it at home to keep as something to use in the future. By making it black and white the pictures seems like an older image, which works with the content of the photograph. The invert tool has reversed the light and dark making the train stand out in the image, as it is actually black but stands out as a point of light in the photo. The photograph looks like it has been taken in black and white with the subject area having huge lights beaming down on it. This gives a great digital effect that really improves the photograph.

Last Lesson on Photoshop

Last lesson we used Adobe Photoshop to work with an image of a desert road. During this lesson we cropped the image to the area that we wanted. Then we used contrast to change the colour depth of the sky, the road and the ground.
On a seperate layer, we learnt how to use levels of light to improve the image. The levels tool helps to tell you if your photograph is under or over exposed, you can then use the histogram to move the light and dark levels to optimise the image and make it look better. By making only small changes we could make the image look like it had been taken better and it was not obvious that it had been edited in Photoshop.