Week 4

Assignment:
-The assignment was to take the information received during the critique session and apply the comments to improve the photo.

Craft: (How did you do it?)
-After the critique session with the group it was obvious that some additional work had to be done to make the photograph presentable. What I intended to say with this photograph is that Abraham Lincoln is a regular citizen who likes to spend time with his family and celebrate holidays amongst them; however, this was not what the photograph presented because some key elements were missing. One key element was that there was nobody else in the picture but Abraham Lincoln; to make the message more vivid it was necessary to add family members. In order to add more people, I had to take some new pictures because none of the old ones fit the theme or the people were in the wrong position. After uploading the new photos into the photoshop program it was time to manipulate them. The first thing that had to be done is remove the color. This was done by unsaturating the picture, thus making it black and white. After cutting the appropriate parts from the new photos they were pasted in a new layer over the photo from the previous blog. It was necessary to get the scale of the photo right so it looked believable, and after completing this task I cleaned up the rough edged around the newly pasted photo so it blends in with the other picture. To have some choice in the end a couple of versions were created of the same photograph with varying positions of the individuals in the photograph, but the same process, cleaning the edges, was taken to make the photo look good. This addressed the issue of not having any members of the family in the picture. Another issue that arose during the critique was that no one was smiling. I was able to fixed this problem by adding smiles using the liquify function. Using the burn tool I was able to darken the neck of Lincoln's body because before it looked like the shirt and the neck blended in together. The last step was adjusting the brightness and contrast to make sure that all parts of the photograph fit together.

Composition: (Arrangement and order of elements)
-When someone is looking at the second and third version of the photograph the first thing that probably jumps out is the Christmas Tree and then the family. This, however, is not the case in the first version of the photograph. When looking at this picture the first thing that an eye notices is the boy and then the eyes travels in succession of increasing height of individuals in the picture. Abraham Lincoln during his presidency was always in the spotlight and the center of attention in the pictures, but these photographs key-in on the idea that he is a regular citizen of The United States of America who likes to spend time with his family, and that is why he does not jump out at first glance.

Concept: (What are you trying to say?)
-What I was trying to accomplish through these pictures is link the past and the future and trying to imagine what Abraham Lincoln and his family would do on Christmas. There are a couple of features that help establish the era of these pictures. In one of the pictures there is a laptop, which is a good indication of the 21st century. Another feature is the Christmas Tree itself. It is a modern idea to get a Christmas Tree and decorate it. Overall the purpose of these images is to connect past and the future in subtle ways.