I was choosing image at very first to look for something living and vivid. The word “plant” appeared in my mind and then I searched for that and found an ideal one that I used for my final picture. Looking at the material, I found the soil part takes a big portion of the picture and consists an important amount of the supporting system of the living life. Such a wonderful section should be compared with something that are welcomed by people in their daily life. Based on the shape and the function, I immediately thought about cake, which are the daily desert that are attractive for many households. Founding a coconut cake picture online, I tried to cut out the picture and blend the cake with the soil perfectly. This step is a little challenging since my photo-editing skill is not proficient enough. Overall, I want to share that living life, especially those supporting systems that work hard always, are as sweet as those we value highly.
This above photomontage was my 13th idea. I scratched the rest. The other twelve made sense in my head but I was unable to translate them. This 13th idea is a ‘gamble’ in itself because there’s an uncertainty in the outcome of the event; will the readers be able to align themselves with my thought? The above photo roots from my dilemma whether life is ‘gamble’ for I strive to make a sure bet everyday. For a choice to be deemed as a gamble, there must exist a stake, a risk, a hope of gain, and a result determined by chance. On immersing myself into this thought, I grew to realise that life may be a gamble but with a biased dice since efforts determine the odds. With every stroke of blending, the odds of you following my thought went from 1:5 to 4:2 to 5:1. Finding the perfectly angled pictures, to combine, was a challenging task since the slant had to play out the concept. Eventually, I was able find them on Flickr. I used Autodesk Sketchbook for cropping and blending. It helped get down to the nitty gritty.
When I first saw this quest, I thought it would be interesting if I made a picture related to the pandemic. The thought of using a disinfectant wipe came when I was at the store the other day and saw the cleaning wipes section completely “wiped” out. I’m not sure how it is in other areas, but in NY, you would be hard pressed to buy a box of Lysol (or any off-brand) wipes. I think it is really interesting how even though we have been in this pandemic for months, it is still difficult to find such a basic cleaning item. I wanted to convey the idea that wipes are found scarcely and thought it would be funny if I put one in an avocado “pit”.
In general, I have never been good at editing pictures and have always deferred the responsibility to my friends, so this was definitely a challenge. I had trouble with the layering of the images, but I eventually realized that each one had to be cropped independently. After some time, I started playing around with the cutout brush and the retouch feature (for blending purposes) which I think, made the images look better together.
When I was younger, and even now sometimes, I would have people tell me from time to time that I have “broccoli hair.”I assume it is because I have a lot of hair and I just can’t seem to stay in place because my hair is really straight and hard, hence my head looks like it spurts out hair from all sides like a broccoli. For this project, I want to crop an image of an actual broccoli and fit it into a portrait of myself. I will admit that I am terrible at photo editing so the final product does not seem really fitting. I, however, had a lot of fun doing this assignment. After all, I guess my hairstyle might not be the most trendy or fashionable, but it least it is “healthy.” Right?
Combo photo of two photos: PC for snake photo is Timothy Dykes via Unsplash.com, and PC for pencil photo is Yono Bulis via his photography
This photo combines a photo of a pencil and a photo of a snake. I combined the two of these using a combination of Pixlr and Snapchat (Snapchat, weirdly enough, was very easy to use for photo editing, especially for some of the minute details Pixlr couldn’t get easily fix).
Initially, I was hoping to combine a photo of a black snake’s with a pen tip, which I thought would look cool, but when I saw the photo of the snake, I quickly visualized a pencil combining with the snake’s tail. The colors seemed to fit in my imagination, and I found this particular combophoto to be striking as the snake’s tail abruptly (perhaps a bit too much) ends and becomes a pencil. I took the photo of the pencil myself, and after deciding on these two images, I set off to use Pixlr.
Through Pixlr, I was able to combine the photos into one, but the colors did not exactly match and one could very clearly see the line separating the two photos. So, on a hunch, I took the photo I had and went to Snapchat, which I’d used for some photo editing before. Snapchat is very user-friendly for photo editing, so I was able to do some round-edge cropping to both fix the color and make it so that the line separating the two photos wasn’t so obvious. Some issues present are that the tip of the pencil is a bit blurry, and in some areas there seem to be ‘creases’ that mark crop work. Overall, this image, to me, conveys the notion that hard work hurts. After spending a long time writing for notes or other work, my pencil often feels like a small snake gnawing on my fingers and wrists.
When I looked at the quest laying on my bed, my first reaction was it would be funny if I could combine a duck feet on my feet. Then, I realized that there are some technical difficulties for the duck’s posture to be exactly the same. So I approached it differently: adhering my feet into a duck’s body. Since I am not good at photo editing at all, getting rid of the background of two pictures is difficult. I had to consult my friend who is an expert in this particular field for assistant, and he literally taught me step by step. The picture conveys a symbol for protection. When the duck lands, it would always land on its feet. Even though no one would be silly enough to land on his or her head, many individuals do such things when they encounter difficulties or obstacles. They devout so much that they test things with their lives. Although I give my who appreciation to their zealous attitudes, I would not believe that everyone should do that with every obstacle they encounter. Bold is different from bravery.
After having difficulty trying to decide what to do for the combophoto, hours before the deadline, I saw my mother’s hairbrush, and then I thought that it would be funny to incorporate that in my blog post.
The only trouble I had was to whiten the hare’s background. What this image was trying to portray is to hurry and improvise when late.
Thinking of an idea for the combophoto was pretty difficult for me. I wanted to combine two pictures that had some connection, but still were completely different from one another. So, I thought of putting together pictures of things that are opposite in terms of size and colour.
I found a picture of a building I had clicked a few months back– it was black and white. The building represented ‘bigness’. I then found some vibrant Lego blocks, made a tower using them and clicked a picture of them at a similar angle (which was very hard to achieve)– this was the ‘smallness’. The result– this image I call ‘Building Blocks’.
I think that this image, in a sense, symbolises growing up. When we’re young and building our little Lego buildings, our world is small and colourful. We’re oblivious to the hardships, stress and obstacles that life is sure to offer. As we mature, we’re exposed to the big, bad ‘real world’. We have real buildings to build, real problems to solve, and the world just doesn’t seem too colourful anymore.
I combined the pictures of a window with a sunset beach scene. The picture of the window is taken by me several days ago. I found this sunset picture from the app, PicsArt. Using the app, I cropped the picture of the sunset into six pieces, resized them, and fitted into the windows. Living by the sea is always my dream. In the original picture, there was just a tree behind the window. After the combination, the window got a charming scene behind it. At first, I have trouble deciding the pictures to combine, spending time looking for pictures on google and many other places. Then, I found this window picture in my phone, and had the idea to change the scene behind the window.
The first thing that came to my mind when I read about this mini-quest was to find an animal that had an object as a part of its name. Like a swordfish, or an angelfish. I decided to choose a hammerhead shark because I thought that it would be the easiest to crop, and I would have the most room for creativity. Now I could obviously just crop a hammer to the shark’s body and call it a day, but I wanted to be a little bit more creative. I wanted to stay in the theme of tools, as a hammer is a tool, so I decided to crop a wrench on the head of the shark. There are a few reasons for my decision. First of all, the head of the wrench looks like a mouth, so my final product could still somewhat look like an animal. Another reason I chose it is because of its symbolism. Wrenches are used to take things apart, but with the ultimate goal of fixing, while a shark’s ultimate goal is to destroy. I thought it would be the perfect tool to put on the head of the shark. In terms of editing, the main problem I had was that in order to fit the wrench head onto the neck of the shark, I needed to significantly enlarge the image, needing to move the picture up multiple times to enlarge the ends. Not only that, but the head ended up being too big. Despite these things, I think my combophoto turned out decently.
