Week Three

Assignment- We had to pick one picture from the 25 photos that we took ourselves, and one picture from the 25 photos from the Lincoln era. We then had to create a mash-up of these images.

Craft- Using Photoshop, I combined Lincoln's head onto my background (the ABC7 news team). Ron Majors' body type and suit seemed to be passable as Lincoln-like, so I pasted Lincoln's head over Majors'. After aligning the head properly, I noticed that Lincoln looked like a corpse. His pale black and white face next to Kathy Brock's tan face seemed a little out of place. I desaturated the entire image and started playing with the hue/saturation and brightness/contrast levels to try and make his face look darker. Seeing a bunch of tan newscasters loaded with makeup in a black and white setting didn't seem right. I decided that the image would look much more realistic if it were color. I gave the image back its color, then began to attempt to make Lincoln's head look more colorful. During this process, I used the paintbrush (changing its opacity), smudge tool (to get rid of the imperfections of the old photograph and as an attempt to make him fit in with his unblemished counterparts), and the color balance (to match the skin type of the rest). As a result, the Lincoln photoshop kind of looked like a painting.

Composition- I was walking along a street downtown when I saw a bus stop with ABC7's news team plastered above a bench. I suddenly had the image in my head of Lincoln standing in the middle of them. I decided to use that picture, after I nixed a few other suggestions. It wasn't too hard finding a picture where Lincoln wasn't smiling. After I began working with the images, I noticed that it was really difficult trying to make Lincoln's head and neck match the rest of the image's color. I'm still working on ways to make Lincoln look less painted on. Because of this difficulty, the thought of desaturating the entire image instead of trying to make it color has come up time and time again.

Concept- Well, Lincoln was not too big on smiling in many of his portraits. He had such a death stare. It feels like he's staring into your soul when you see pictures of him. I wanted to capture this glare and contrast it with modern day society's representation of media members. People in the media are usually layered with makeup while carrying large grins across their faces to portray an image of togetherness. By having Lincoln and his death stare thrown in the middle of these personalities, I'm trying to rebel against society's idea of what it means to truly be "together." What better man of his era to do it than Lincoln?