When looking at Rosler’s work and comparing it to mine she aims at more sensitive topics like war and the people behind war as shown in the image below. Where as I was going for a less serious and more jokey topic. Her work, specifically this image, influenced me because of when I put one cow in I thought that the image looked empty so to get some inspiration for what to put in the to fill some of the empty space I saw this image and thought to repeat the cow and put it in different places and with different sizes. If I had other pictures of cows I would have used them but as I didn’t I decided to use the same one but just change the size of it.
When making the image I decided to make multiple copies of the cows and change their size, also the visit jersey logo had to be slightly larger than I originally planned because of the shade of it and it almost blending in to the sky in the photo.
I think that the background image is good because it means that any messy edges are not as apparent, the reason for this is because it was taken on 35mm film, and so was the photo of the bull.
Martha Rosler is an American artist. She works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler’s work is centred on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women’s experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to places of passage and systems of transport.
The work of hers that appeals to me is her photomontage work. The reason for this is that it has a message, the images aren’t just face value they are trying to make a statement. Sometimes the statement that she is trying to make is slightly controversial.
What she does it either takes or obtains images and then overlays parts of hem on-top on on another normally making it look obvious that she has done it, she doesn’t try to hide the fact that she has made adjustments to the images.
My thought is to try and make something that imitates the “visit Jersey” adverts, the reason that I am going to do this is that I already have a large selection of images that are of Jersey land marks and ‘Quintessentially’ Jersey things. Therefore I will find a landscape of a castle or something that is clearly from Jersey and then overlay somethings like Cows and surfers.
The cow and the landscape are my images and the other two are taken from the Jersey tourism, my plan is to use the landscape as the background and then cut the cow out and put it on the right of the image. I will also cut out the surfer and put him is the small puddle at the landscape. Finally I will use the magic wand tool and get rid of the background of the logo.
Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Here are some examples that i like:
Within my image there are some faults with the composition and some minor photoshop problems, the reason that it didn’t get re-done is because the faults are very small and have only been seen by me because I have been looking at a very large version of it for a long time.
The problem here is that I wasted this space and didn’t take a photo within this area.
The problem here is that my hands on the edge of the pew are not in a straight line, this means that there is a jagged line but it is hard to see.
With 3 there is a small gap between two of the images of me essentially making a big gap in the middle of my chest. However, this isn’t a major problem because it is very far away and the wall behind is the same colour.
There is a small gap between the arm rest and my side, this is okay because it just looks like I am slightly further across the seat.
I lost a foot somehow and the end of my leg is missing but it is partly covered by the lamp in the pulpit.
Overall the image is good and the faults are only visible upon close inspection so I am happy with it.
My final image turned out almost as I intended, one problem is that i could have done more poses sitting or interacting with the pews on the left side of the photo.
I think that I replicated his work well and also added my slight touch to it. I have the main few subjects in the photo; I also have a few more discrete ones in the backdrop and who will mean that there is something to the image at a glance but the more that it is explored the more is discovered.
A difference that I made without thinking about it is that my images are taken from a bigger distance and this means that my face isn’t as clear and apparent as it could be, where as with Paul’s work he is close to the camera and his face is clear in each image this means that his work has a slightly bigger impact on the viewer because it takes less time to see that every person in the image is him.
But I think by doing some of the weirder poses that I did like the upside down, the shirtless and the reflection of it in the door and having the umbrella open meant that I have en-captured the style of Paul as he often has odd poses in his images.
Here is the final image that I made. The solution to the moving tripod, I feel was successful as you cannot see anything that is not aligned without looking very closely at some parts. Other than the editing that it took to make the images of myself appear there was little else done, this was done because I got the exposure correct in camera and knew that if i changed it for one I would have to change it in the exact same way in the exact same amount for each layer, also leaving it with some parts slightly over exposed and some areas with a bit too much shadow means that the image is more realistic and life like and the exposure isn’t so far to one side that an area draws way too much attention and distracts from the whole image.
When editing the photos I encountered a problem that I have mentioned in an earlier post and that is that because I had no trigger and a tripod not suited to my camera, I had some minor problems with camera shake and movement, I did partly fix it by having the camera on a timer but there was some slight miss-alignment in the editing but I did manage to find a way around it, and still produce the image that I wanted.
What I tried to do was just to layer each photo on-top of one another and simply rub out the areas where I was in the photo, however, because of the straight lines of the pews and the shake of the camera, that didn’t work, so I decided to add each photo one at a time on top of each other and before I put the next layer on I had a bank layer called “drawing” (seen as the top of the three layers above) and I carefully drew round each of the “me’s” and then rubbed out the filling from the red box each time, and after I did this on a layer I made the drawing layer invisible, by clicking the small eye next to it, and then merged the visible layers and built it up until i had the complete image.
Seen above is the completed image with all outlines.
When I went to take the photos there was a slight problem that the area wasn’t lit as well as I had hoped because the shoot took place in the evening an it was dark, to combat this I boosted the iso on my camera slightly higher than I would have liked but not so much that the grain was immediately evident. Then as I didn’t have a trigger and the tripod I was using is not very strong and I have a large camera my friend who was operating had problems keeping the camera still, the way that I combated this is I set the camera to have a 5 second timer and to take a two shot burst at the end of the timer. This eliminated most of the shake but there was still some.
SOME PHOTOS MISSING
The problem that I had is that image 3227-8 I sat in a bad place and didn’t realise until I reviewed them the next day. The problem was that because in that pose i was leaning onto the back of the pew in-front was being obstructed by a more important image that I later took that was more important to the shoot and would stand out more. So I had to leave images 3227-8 out of the final edit. And all of the images in the green boxes made it into the edit and some that wouldn’t appear on the contact sheet.
