Week 3

Assignment: Combine two pictures together (one old and one new)

The assignment that was given was for us to combine two pictures with one being from the Lincoln era and the other being one we have taken recently. 

Craft:

The way I decided to start the project was to find one of my pictures that I liked and wanted to change to have Lincoln in it. This was a bad idea because the hardest part of this project was to find a Lincoln face that would work or look right in the new picture. That's when I decided to look over the pictures I had of Lincoln so I would have an idea of the pictures I had of him. Then from there I went to my pictures and scrolled through to see which picture one of the faces of his would work in. After, finding a few that would work I choose which one I wanted to do. Seeing that the hardest part was finding the two pictures to use and now that part of it was done I could open them both and work some magic. I went to the Lincoln picture and I used the magic wand to select just his face and copied it. Then, I pasted Lincoln's face into my other picture. I free transformed his face until it was to a size that matched the size of the body. After that, I made a copy of the background picture and then put the layers in this order original, Lincoln's face, and original copy. Then I lowered the opacity of the background copy so I could see the outline of Lincoln's face and erased the person's face in the copy so Lincoln's face would show through. Then I raised the opacity back to 100% and moved to the Lincoln face layer to smooth some of the edges around his face. I then took out the saturation from both pictures and added a black/white layer to each of them.

Composition/Concept: 

In this photograph I wanted it to be something out of the norm for Lincoln and also connect Lincoln to the present which is the new picture. First, the picture is two of my friends on the train that is in Chicago,Ill which is the connection in my eyes because Lincoln is from Illinois. Then for putting Lincoln in a situation of attire that he is never seen in. All the pictures I found of Lincoln him were of him by himself and no emotion/expression.  Making Lincoln look like one of my friends gives him some expression with the thumbs up, there is a friend with him which is rare to see him with someone else in the picture, and finally he is in street clothes. All the pictures of Lincoln were of him all dressed up and I wanted to bring him out of his element which downgrading his clothes does I feel.