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.