Reinventing the Familiar: Family Photos

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Homework due this week was fun and creative, not to mention, fairly easy.  Just one image and it could be created however you chose.  This was my take on a photo of my brother-in-law and his family.  I thought it would be funny to use one person to portray all of the members of the family.  I only had myself, so that's who I used.  It's a creepy image, but it makes me laugh.  

Comments

Erin McGuire said…
Holy crap, that is amazing! Made me laugh my ass off. The faces are fantastic. How the hell did you do that? I mean I know you must have used PS, but what tools in PS did you use? I cant see any seems. I mean it looks like a regular photograph. And the light on each "family member" looks perfect, like they were right there when the pic was taken. This is really incredible.
11:54 AM
Kelly said…
Yeah, it was of course photoshop. No special tools either. I simply shot all of the images of myself sitting in roughly the same places they would be in the final image. That way, the light (and shadows) would fall where they should for each version of me. I kept all of the exposures the same as they would be for a single exposure. The camera, naturally, remained in one spot, without moving it at all. I then used selection tools to separate myself from the various backgrounds then placed them one by one onto the image of me on the far right--that was my background image. I had to use the transform tools to resize myself and also to resize my heads in the smaller versions of me because kids have proportionally larger heads than adults. After I got everyone into place, I used the eraser tool to get rid of rough edges and awkward overlapping of the different layers. Then I used the blur tool to soften the clean edges around each cropped image so that they would fit into their surroundings. Then I looked at the original photo of my brother-in-law and his family to see what the flash shadows should look like--simply burned those in. Man, when I looked in the mirror at myself while I was getting ready for each new shot, it was not easy to make the decision to just let myself look as bad as possible. I thought it would be funnier (and creepier) that way--to make myself look as run down and old as I could for the kid versions of myself. Not easy to put out there, but I think my instructor was impressed by the fact that I was willing to do that.

It isn't all about showing the world what's "perfect", false, and void of any emotional depth.
4:22 PM
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