Overlay Portrait

For my first overlay portrait, I used the photograph taken in class with the light to create the black shadow, and by changing the levels on the photo, the shadow became more distinct. When I took out the background, I kept it plain black to blend in with my face shadow and make my face stand out more. I rotated and dragged the red smoke on top of my face with a lower opacity to fade into my face and this texture worked out very well. The red hair highlights go well with the red smoke and the low-opacity brush tool cooperated with me easily to blend the black into the face on this portrait. I could have removed those faded red lines since they are not an important part of the image, and I have just noticed at the very right I dropped a dark red line instead of black.






















For my extra portrait overlay, I used the same photograph and changed the levels again to give off the same shadow effect as before.. I took out the background and replaced it with a gradient from a deep red to black to match the shine from the hair. When I put the texture over top my face, I lowered the opacity and erased unwanted areas. I didn't think it looked very natural due to the contrast of black and the brown/yellow, so I tried to make the edges darker with the low-opacity brush tool of black, and I think it helped a bit, but not as much as the first image. I didn't like how uneven the erasing around my hair against the gradient background turned out because it looks quite raggedy and unrealistic too. The gradient itself turned out great to match the red glare from my hair.

In both overlays, I used the rule of thirds when I cropped the images. I only erased the texture from my eye in both portraits and not my eyebrow because it was too light to show it naturally. 

This is the original, un-cropped photo.

Digital Warhol Style Portraits

For this photo, I used orange and three different shades of blue because they are complementary colours on the colour wheel. The eyes are a light blue, the mouth is a bright blue, and the background is a primary blue.

In this image I used analogous colours on my portrait. The background is a mix of red-violet and red, the face is a bright purple, eyes are light red-violet, and the mouth is bright red-violet. These toned colours go well together and the black section contrasts them easily.

For this edit, I switched it up and changed the black to blue and used cool, monochromatic colours of blue. Since blue itself is a darker colour, it doesn't give off the "negative" effect other brighter colours might show.

When I uploaded this photo to blogger, something went wrong and a bit of colour (light purple) was lost in my eyes. I tried re-painting and saving again but it remained the same.

Yellow and purple are complementary colours and they both stand out against the black frame.

My favourite image would have to be the blue monochromatic one because the cool colours ended up looking very nice beside eachother without any black sections. Each image took me a while to paint because there was a lot of pixels I had to zoom in and fill in individually. Next time I could paint over the pixel areas to save myself time.

This is the original, un-cropped and un-thresholded photo.

Flag Day Photojournalism

General Thomas Lawson receiving Our Lady of Lourdes National Leadership Award.
I chose to crop it to the point where both girls and the Crusaders symbol were kept in the photo.

Students showing spirit for Flag Day by doing face paint, stamps, and carrying the Canadian flag.
I chose to keep this photo in colour because the red of the stamps, paint, flag is important part of representing our flag.

Veterans saluting the Canadian flag as O Canada is being sung by Lourdes Choir.
I cropped a bit off the left side to center to flag and the black & white puts more emotion into the scene.

Photojournalism Ethics

Staging scenes is not acceptable while capturing a photo of an important event. You may move an object to get a better view of the main focus as long as that object is not an important part of the scene. Adding or removing objects is not right since that is not what the original scene was and  changing it could change the whole message too. Altering the scene should be unacceptable in most situations, like the “It All Began With a Mouse” scenario, numerous photographers staged scenes to have the same message as the original photo. 

Manipulation of Digital Images can be put to good use, but not when you are dealing with a real event that is shown the the public as the "truth". The "Sharks invade New Jersey" example shows that if your audience is gullible enough, you can get away with anything. Someone with basic Photoshop skills could easily turn something like a city flood into a shark-infested flood in just a view clicks on the computer.

Intrusion into privacy is a sensitive subject most people tend to have varying opinions on. People either try their best to respects other people's privacy, or they just are nosy and disrespecting the boundaries set by that other person. Public figures deserve to have a private life a part from their well known career, but some say it is good to know what kind of person they are in the real world. I think they have a right to be able to spend time with their family without being bothered by paparazzi, journalists, etc. Photojournalists' job is to take photos of current events and bring them back for journalists to write the story so the public is aware of what is going on. If families in grief want privacy, they could let the photojournalist know that they're aren't comfortable with being photographed. The photographers don't want to take photos for negative reasons, they do it to make others aware of the situation with a visual aspect to it. Awareness is a big deal lately and photojournalism is a perfect way to catch people's attention. 

Jennifer Garner yells "My three children are private citizens" at paparazzi.

The New Kid

For this project, I used Michela's photo as my base because her skin seemed even enough for me to take out her eyes and mouth without it looking odd. I chose Pietro's eyes because I wanted to put glasses on her, but a lot of people used Teagan's so I switched it up. I don't know if Michela normally wears glasses, but after putting them on her myself, I think they would suit her well. Also, I replaced her mouth with Caz's because Caz's smile is very bright in her school photo and it fit well in between Michela's cheeks. 

I think I did well on cutting out a pair of new eyes and a new mouth for Michela's face, but I could have cut off more of the glasses on the left side and tilted the smile a tad more to the left to line up better with her cheeks and nose as well. Replacing her t-shirt with Christian's turned out better than I thought, so I'm happy with that result. Now for the hair, which I trimmed to a nice bob cut, looks kind of fake in some parts because of the blurriness of the clone stamp. I'll admit, this new kid looked more realistic before I edited the hair, but I really wanted to experiment with changing hairstyles, and colouring her hair was not an option since I find it rather difficult to make the colour look natural. Hence the blurry hair cut.