Rafal Milach inspired photo shoot/montage making

In this photo shoot I plan on taking image of the occupation objects in a slightly more artistic way. I will be using very vividly colored background as this is what Rafal did in his work, and I like how it makes the objects he’s photographing stand out more. I also like how he used geometrical patterns in order to symbolise being being enclosed or trapped, so I will be using different geometrical shapes in order to do the same thing as it symbolises how Jersey people must have felt under the occupation. I want to create a strong sense of displacement through contrasting colours, and a feeling of being trapped through the use of geometrical shapes.

Here are all the images I took, you can see the both the flagged and rejected images.

From my flagged images, I colour coded my best pictures green and my least favorite, red.

Best images

Further developing using archive images

1st montage:

Firstly, I used the patch tool to get rid of some marks that can be seen on the card as I wanted the background to appear very pristine and put together.

I then cropped the image because I wanted the object to be at the centre since it didn’t look right having a lot of clear space to the left of the image.

I then used to quick selection tool to highlight the area shown above as I wanted to place an archival image there. I then right clicked the area, and pressed layer via cut so that part of the image became a layer that I could delete at the end.

I then dragged and dropped an archival image onto my initial image and placed it just above my background. I also decided to use the quick selection tool again to get rid of the lens of the object. I then moved the archival image in the background, so that one of the figures could be seen through the lens area.

2nd montage:

To begin, I used the quick selection tool in order to get rid of any markings on the backgrounds I used.

I then used the quick selection tool to get rid of the area of my original picture that I wanted gone.

As you can see above, I got rid of the area within the geometrical shapes as I thought this was the place where the archival image would look best.

3rd montage:

Similarly to before, I dragged my archival background picture onto my original image.

I then selected certain areas of the picture that I wanted removed so that we could see the archive image in the background.

4th montage:

To achieve my final montage, I used the archive image seen above. I thought an interesting part of the image was the nurse and the soldier shaking hands, and also the medical sign. I selected both of these areas using the quick selection took, so that I was then able to place them onto my image. After selecting them, I used to eraser tool to clean up the edges as I knew they would be going onto a photo with a bright background.

After placing the two sections of the archive image, onto my own, I then went on to open another archival image of a Jersey landscape as I thought this would make my montage more interesting. I selected the blue area of my montage with the quick selection tool, deleted the selected layer and dragged the archival image on. Since the lighthouse would’ve originally been covered to the my placement of the medical sign, I then flipped the image horizontally.