The Thinker
Evaluation
Have you described your subjects processes clearly and concisely?
This idea was really creative for me as I grew up always wanting to be teleported into the stories people tell, books that I read/listen to and even shows. I am more that happy of what the outcome is and I think I have laid out the work accordingly.
Have you considered and examined the merits and problems of the subjects?
Merits - The base image turnt out to be wonderful as the lighting was worth waiting for as I did not require to do additional correction on it. This project workout well ad I had all the old books that my mother has organised on the shelves and photoshop having all the tools needed to make this an easy and fun task.
Problems - For the problems, there were almost none. The only serious issue that I had was that photoshop kept crashing so it took be a couple of days to debug and reinstall as my internet connect was not the best. Other than that, I had to get a tripod mount from my smartphone and the sun was barely out therefore some pictures were washed out or just too flat
Have you evaluated your subject matter, equipment, and editing?
Similarly to the "From A to B work, I have broken down what I have used and what my settings were but the listed settings are not firm, in every different scenario, there will be different use cases and hence I have talked more on the setup and editing than the equipment. The subject was in center frame with subject had the ideal pose.
What you would do differently?
For this project the one thing I would do next is to get a colour changing light bar to put on the shelf to give the shelves and the subject more depth and a more interesting feel.
The Process
The Setup
The equipment used was:
iPhone 12
Tripod
Phone Mount
Large door that gives in massive (like massive) amount of light (from the left)
As I was alone, I thought to keep things simple, having observed my house (which I will not show for privacy reasons), I went to the corner with the giant sliding door, because of the lighting and placed my scene there.
With this, I scavenge the room for a stool for me to sit on and adjusted the tripod to around 4ft for that it allowed the phone to shoot my upper torso. I used the 1x lens on the phone shooting in raw format. Before shooting, I made sure that the shelves had been wiped clean to see the reflections of the books and waited until the rain stopped.
The base image
Base Image
I suffer from dyslexia, which caused me to not be able to read and write well, even time to time stumbling and stuttering over my own words, unable to puzzle the sentence in my head. It didn't mean that I hated the books, more of just its interesting how people are different from one another.
This photo was a little over exposed with what I wanted but it was a good shot nevertheless. Now time to edit.
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Reference
I got the idea for the project from my childhood cartoon, ChalkZone, where is about kids who would go into chalk board world to have adventures with chalk boy called Snap. This show was a major part of me growing up because I have dyslexia and since I was not great at reading, I used to draw, imagine myself as Rudy (the main Character) going in my own adventures in my own world.
Some other references come from Russell C Smith with his mixed media collages and another animated character, Aye-Aye Spirit from The Legends of Korra
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Edit
Creating Backdrop
First steps were to get the scanned images into photoshop to create the backdrop for the final piece. This was done pretty quickly by using the quick selection tool that creates a selection of the page and than applying a mask to make the collage. Prior to this, I had arrange and resize the the scan pages to areas which I wanted it to fill.
Process was done to each page.
Sketch Effect and Eye
I duplicated the base image to twice to be able to create this effect. I took one copy to to invert the colour and some blur. I than used another copy with a black and white filter to eliminate all the colours. Shading for the darker areas of the sketch was done by adding a filter from the filter gallery within the sketch folder called "Charcoal" and "Glowing Edges".
For the eye, I took a picture of my area using my drone when the sky was slightly clear and placed in above the sketch layer. I resized the image and added some shadow using the brush tool to the make it look more realistic.
Final
Again I duplicated the original image and brought it to the top of the layers and created a mask around the areas I want the sketch version to show. The image is not ready.