My Final Four Manipulated Images altogether.

I based my manipulated photographs on 'Time', because we had to chose a theme to link them altogether. Each photograph says something about the passing of time. Two of these photos are in a serious vein and the other two more humourous.

I started off by looking through my photographs to see if any would be good as a base and then wrote down a series a sayings about time. I then planned on paper ideas that I could use. Some of these I discarded and I was left with four ideas. This was the easy part. Getting to grips with photoshop proved more of a challenge, as the computer at college was an Apple Mac and the layout is quite different to my laptop at home. Also I could only afford to buy the Photoshop Elements and therefore I only had the basic tools at hand. I still found the layout pretty confusing. It was only with a great deal of experimentation and perseverence that I got to grips with it.

The equipment I used was my Nikon D3100 Camera, my tripod, a fully charged battery and lots of space on my memory card.

On all the photographs I have used various layers and used The Quick Selection tool and the Magnetic Lasso tool to lift the props from photographs. I have also used the blurring technique, distortion, perspective, Skew and Scale to position things appropriately in my pictures. On some of the photographs I have played around with Opacity, Saturation and Monotone.

Eric Johansson, an artist whose work I enjoyed, influenced my western photograph. His work ranged from clever to humourous and is always thought provoking. I enjoyed the fact his pictures are quite surreal and I have tried to get the same effect in my pictures. Another artist whose work I liked was John Goto. His style is like collage work where he brings things together to make a quirky photo. This influenced in particular my 'Time of Their Lives' Photograph. I found his style to be quite light hearted and as I like collage as a craft in itself I was interested to combine this with photography.

On the whole I am pleased with my final manipulated pieces especially as I had never used photshop before. I had a distinct learning curve and am quite proud that I managed to come through it and now I don't find it so scary. I found that manipulated images really awakens your imagination and I look forward to experimenting on a larger scale. As always, when I look at the photographs I always feel that I could have doen better but I feel that will always be the case. Manipulating Images is quite time consuming and it is easy to get carried away and very difficult to know when to stop. Sometimes it ios a case of less is more.

Here are my four final images:

'Winter Time'

'Tempus Fugit'

'Time of Their Lives'

'Sands of Time'