Plan:
For my Final Piece, my plan is to photograph someone sitting in front of a laptop and then when editing, use the liquify tool in photoshop to make it look like their face is being sucked into the laptops screen, in the style of Antoine Geiger. Just in case the liquify tool distorts the laptop as well, I may take photos of the laptop and the model separately so they can both be on different layers in photoshop, if needed. I am going to use a grey background for this shoot.
Shoot:
When I was taking photos in the studio I had someone sit in front of a laptop and look down at it. I made sure to take multiple pictures; All from the same angle as I used a tripod. Some contained the model and some had just the laptop in the frame. This was so I could layer the different images together in Photoshop if I needed to.
When I begun editing this photo there were a few marks and cracks on the grey background so I used the spot healing tool to get rid of them. I then used the liquify tool to make it look like the models face was being sucked into the laptops screen. A problem with doing this was that it liquified the surroundings as well, so I fixed this by using the object selection tool to make a copy of just the laptop on the layer above and also made a copy of the original image underneath the distorted one. This was so I could erase most of the liquified layer so only the face was stretched and nothing else.
I wanted to make it look like there was light emitting from the laptop so I used the polygonal lasso tool to alter the levels in different areas of the photo and used colour balance to make the light look slightly blue. To resemble the light creating a shadow behind the model, I used the burn tool with a large brush and finally, increased the contrast of the whole image.
I’m proud of how this photo turned out as I think, although it looks quite bizarre, it gets the message across that people seem to be getting completely sucked into technology as many struggle to look away from their screens. I feel I could develop this idea further by making it look like a hand (coming from the laptop) is about to grab the model and drag them into the screen.
I’m going to attempt this by using the same original picture and editing a hand/arm into the photo as well.