Assembled Images

My four assembled images—collage centrepieces digitally comped back into 5-shot panoramas of the original locations. (More fine digital work needed).

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Note added 24-08-21:

These pieces are now available as limited edition C-Types.

Treatment

The decision to push the centrepieces back into the scenery was driven by the original idea of having them as physical objects shot in situ. Having made the decision to go with a digital composite I still wanted to retain the sense that the objects are physically manifested in the scenes. I chose to keep the size, position and proportions uniform throughout all four because I didn't want to add a further layer of complexity.

I like the centralised relationship between the two rectangles because it communicates the analogy between them to the viewer. I'm pleased with the way that the scale of the objects appears to change depending on how much scenery I've put in front of them. In this way I've been able to make decisions on the object's position in the Z-axis while keeping the X and Y position uniform. Shadows on the surfaces, ambient lighting colour and contrast tweaks have been added by hand.

Conclusions and next steps

I've created the digital image files at 6'x2' size and 300ppi for their intended final purpose—full size printing and exhibition. (300ppi is upsampled from a max. pixel resolution that equates approximately to 240ppi depending on individual crops).

For this stage I've printed physical proofs at 1m width. When it comes to investing in printing these as full size C-Types I will engage in another round of amends to make sure colour and content are as precise as possible. I anticipate that I may want to make adjustments to the physical centrepiece collages and replace the photographs in the composites in their exact same positions. I've created them in such a way as to make this a simple process (using Photoshop's Smart Objects)—all lighting and shadows will remain unaltered.

Goals

One of my goals with these final images was to answer my requirement of to produce a set of four images that was unusual and thought provoking. This has informed some of my decision making around size and subject. With this in mind I will be working on how to title these works as well as how to make concise captions and a description of this project to accompany future exhibition.

Looking back I'm quite surprised at where this idea took me creatively. I'm enthused by the potential in the theme and see the four images that I brought through to execution for this unit as the beginning of a larger body rather than the end of a series.

I feel as though I've only scratched the surface and there's a lot more to unpack in terms of scenographic/psychological image making. I'm looking forward to more photographic exploration into the nature of memory and the tension between objective reality and subjective interpretation.

At its core it's a simple idea and I want to experiment with expressing it in different ways and pushing it further.