Inspiration
Rubén Chase |
Chase was born in 1990 in Vigo, Spain. He says "I began to get interested in photography at 16, and the passion for creating images has accompanied me ever since." Chase creates surrealist images using Photoshop.
Chase's images are imaginative and bizarre, some look as if they have meaning and some just look weird. The photo with the lens being attached to the eye socket, captioned 'The After', could possibly show there is something he can't see, so he uses the lens to get a different perspective. Furthermore the photo with several heads in the mirror, captioned 'Looking at so many things at a time', could suggest he sees his different personalities in the mirror which no one else can see. Also the photo with the hand reaching out from the ground, captioned 'The hard process of growing', shows a hand trying to break free from the ground, this could mean that someone is oppressed and wants to be set free, but the vines round the arm shows that it is difficult.
Laura Williams
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Laura Williams is a graphic designer and photographer from the UK, she produces fine art portraits, event photography and digital retouching. She says: “I like to use photography to blur the lines between real life and fantasy to create unusual artworks.” Williams uses mirrors to create the out of world effect, by obscuring her face and parts of her body, making her self-portraits ‘invisible’.
Williams' surreal photos are varied in what they show, but they are mostly portraits. Some of her photos look as if they have meaning and some are just a surreal concept. The photo of Williams on her laptop sitting crossed leg and floating could show she feels like she is in her own world, in her own bubble just like the photo of her in the jar sitting against a tree reading a book. Another image that can be interpreted is the photo of Williams on her own in the woods, with a clock for a head; to me this shows that she feels like time is running out and that she feels isolated, which is supported by her choice of background, the woods, which has connotations of being eerie and scary.
What do I want to achieve?
For this project I want to create a varied range of photos that are both similar to the artists' work and different. I want my ideas to be more challenging to create and unique.
My Photos
Annotations
I took inspiration from an image I found for my surrealism mood board, I wanted to recreate this image with my own twist by having the model look to the right into the distance, then have a large part of her left side 'missing', the branch in between helped me achieve this effect. For this photo I used an exposure time of 1/125 second, an F-stop of 4.5 and an ISO of 800 and I used the same settings to take the background image that I erased the first image to reveal, this created the illusion that part of her body is invisible.
I was inspired by Laura Williams to create this photo, I knew it was going to be challenging as I hadn't done anything similar before. I had to erase the head of my model so that the glasses would be 'floating', but the problem was that the back of the collar was not visible and neither was the arms of the glasses. So I took a photo of the glasses on their own in a high-key setup which I photoshopped into the main photo, which I also used a high-key setup for. The back of the collar was duplicated from the front and flipped, then darkened.
For this photo I took inspiration from my mood board, the original photo is using a shard of a mirror to create the illusion that her eyes are looking directly at the camera, with her head tilted to the side. I used a hand held mirror instead of a shattered mirror because I wanted to make my photo different. When editing the photo I changed the photo into black & white because it looked much more effective, but also because the green of the trees was distracting away from the model. If I was to redo this photo to improve it I would make sure to use a better background, possibly a low-key setup, instead of natural light and trees. The natural light made it difficult to get a clear photo of my model's eyes, therefore studio lights would be much easier.
This photo is a double exposure from a high-key setup, I didn't take inspiration from an artist, but it was something that I wanted to try. I took a photo of my model and a separate photo of the skull in a high-key setup. I edited the skull into the portrait, I made it black & white in addition to the portrait just because I thought it looked better. I wanted to reveal the skull of my model, but when I edited the portrait in Photoshop I found that only having half of the skull showing looked much better than all of it showing. The skull was layered over the portrait and positioned and sized to fit the face of my model, I erased the background around the skull to isolate it, and to make the image look cleaner. I then changed the opacity of the skull to reveal the face beneath it, and finally I erased the skull with a lower opacity to blend the face and the skull together.
Evaluation
During the project I studied two artists, Laura Williams and Rubén Chase, from looking at their work I learned how to try new techniques and styles, and how varied surrealism photos can be. Initially I had ideas about photographing a 'floating' book, but once I edited the photo it didn't look how I imagined it, the photo was a little bit under-exposed which made editing and isolating the book much harder than I thought I would be. I also attempted a double exposure, but it didn't look surreal enough, so I changed my ideas. I decided to make an inspiration board alongside my artist research, this helped me think of ideas, but also I decided to try out some of the ideas that I found, but make it my own. My favourite photo was the floating glasses as to me it looks the most effective and it encouraged me to use Photoshop skills I haven't used before, therefore improving my ability to use Photoshop.