Conclusion

This is my final presentation of my final image.

"An aspect of surrealism is the distortion of reality and the production of images that explore visual contradictions and fantasy. Examples can be seen in the photographic work of Chema Madoz and Angus McBean. Consider a range of examples and proudce your own work in response to this theme"

I think that I answered this question really well, because I explored distortion that occurs between fantasy and reality. I also think I progressed with my photo editing skills throughout this project very smoothly, as you can tell from editing from the beginning to the end gets a lot better. My final image could also be based on one of the Hindu Gods who was born with 6 arms.  Overall I am really pleased with my final image as I think it is a cumulative finish from all of my other examples. I also think I developed my first multiplicity shot in a secure way which shows how my creativity has developed throughout the course.

My final shoot.

For my final shooting I decided to focus on creating multiple limbs to symbolise the business of a womans lifestyle in the home. I focused this even more upon cooking, as it was taken in a kitchen. This is my final image:

First Final Shoot Images.

I decided in my final piece, that by using the art of multiplicity, I could display a message of how there is never enough hours in the day to complete everything you need to do. I decided that I could use a few different stereotypes to signify this, including:

- Students, having to keep a social life, earn some money, start gaining independence and do well in their exams as well as attempting to get enough sleep etc.
- Women, having to look after the house, children, still earn money and do all of the household chores
- Men, having to go out and earn the money, while still having to attempt to spend time with the family
- I also thought about taking some environmental portraiture of colleagues at my work, which could demonstrate how they are always so busy and as soon as they have finished one job, another one immediately appears.

After some careful analysing of all of these I decided that the representation of women would probably be the easiest to portray. I then tried to think of all the different jobs that woman do around the house, and wrote them in a list, which included:

- Cooking
- Cleaning
- Looking after children
- Job
- Chores, ie taking out the bins, sweeping floor
- Washing up/ drying up
- Ironing
- Socialising

I then tried to think how I could incorparate these in to my multiplicity shots. To take this to the next level from my previous attempts, I decided to include the same person more than once as well as the multiplicity of any limbs. As it seemed most suitable, I thought that I could take these pictures in a set up kitchen, which would be very clean and tidy, linking back to the roles of women.

Ikityc

However, with these images due to the size of my kitchen I was getting in my way quite a lot, and blocked myself. I also didn't like how it wasn't very focused or obvious that it was surreal, so I decided to move back on to the multiple limbs.

More progression

I created this picture which tells the story of a young woman trying to make herself look pretty in all the typical ways. This one is quite roughly edited, but I discoverd half way through that a lot of the arms overlapped in editing, and so it wouldn't work very well. I worked on this picture a bit more than my previous attempts by focusing on the background a bit more, and making sure it was in it's correct environment.

Ideas for final shoots.

I wanted my final piece to be an image which tied all of my previous experiments and research together to create a strong idea. I decided that I would look back over my previous images and decide which had been the most successful.

I knew from the start that I wanted to create a project which was based mainly on the pre production of images, and editing them on Photoshop or GIMP. Therefore, I think it is important that my final image requires a lot of processing from setup, to camera and then to finish. The project that I most enjoyed creating was the panoramic worlds, as I found the end result of these very rewarding. However, I didn't really know how I could further the development of these images. In addition, living on an Island I am extremely limited with the amount of locations I can photograph to create interesting 'planets'. I did attempt some images but the weather has been undependable and everytime I go to shoot it has been raining.

Because of this I decided to move on to the most succesful imagery experiment of mine which I believe is the Multiplicity. I am going to try and further this in some more shoots to develop a strong idea for my final piece.

My Panoramic World

This is my recreation of a panoramic planet from Erik Johansson. It was fairly easy to create, and the hardest bit was probably taking the panorama. However, on my camera I have the function which helps me to 'stitch' images together while looking at them which creates a fluid panorama. Once I had done this I open it on Photoshop, and firstly rotate it by 180 degrees so it is upside down. Then I went into Filter --> Distort --> Polar Coordinates, and selected the option for 'Rectangualar to Polar'. This made the round shape in to a planet, but it was rather squashed. To rectify this I simply went on to Canvas Size and made the height the same size as the width which made it an even circle.

I am quite pleased with this picture as I think it worked quite well altogether. Although I had a bit of a problem with the images fitting together in the panorama on a previous post, you cannot see this in this final image.  If I could do it again, and if I have time I will, I would like to photography some things which are in the grass section,  as this is what Erik Johansson did. Linking back to the question, this image distorts the perception of reality by creating an imaginary world out of what should be a flat image.

Christophe Huet

Another artist that I have found on the internet is Christophe Huet. He is a French artist who specialises in creative retouching, and produces some very high class images. One of my favourite shots by him is this one, which I think is really quite quirky and interesting.

I am going to attempt to recreate this image with some ideas of my own. First off I am going to use a real life Mr Potato Head to give the effect of the sections of the face. I photographed all of the parts of a Mr Potato Head and merging real life features in with it. Here are the pictures that I took of the features, and also the original picture of me.

Photo

I created the nose by taking a close up of my nose and layering it over the artificial nose, but making it slightly opaque so you can still see quite a lot of the original nose underneath. With the eyes I simply took my iris and pupil of my eye and layering it over the original pupil. This was quite easy to do as the fake eye is very simply designed and didn't require any editing.

The first thing I did to my face is blur the features around to create a flat image to place the potato head on top of it. I then layered up the potato head image with all the features on top of it, and created this final image: