A Normal Family Portrait: Final Project

 

Description:

This is my final project for Senior Studio I. This project took lots of planning and coordination to achieve the look that I wanted. Taking inspiration from Gregory Crewdson and Jeff wall I combined 10 images to create my final product. I wanted to make a photograph that represented triangular relationship structures in the family unit. This was the final composition that a decides on and felt it represented the emotions I wanted to viewer to feel. In my practice recently I am looking to give a little less information to the viewers to allow contemplation and curiosity rather then giving everything to them. I believe this photograph can illicit many different explanations and that is rewarding to me. This photo is heavily inspired by the theme and time period of Death of a Salesmen, which has a huge impact on my life the first time I read it. 

The Process: 

I open all of these photos in Lightroom classic then click open in layers in photoshop. This then allows me to edit a PSD file that will still remain in Lightroom which is perfect as Lightroom is my preferred editing software when it comes to colour, exposure etc. I then used black mask on all the layers to paint in the light on the individuals as I wanted. This was difficult as there was slight movement in the subjects even after aligning everything exactly in photoshop. Once I had completed the painting of the light I then masked out all of the subjects in the photograph and used the marquee tool to make a selection of the backdrop and do a content aware fill. Once I completed that I used clone stamp and the patch tool to get some of the imperfections out of the backdrop fill. At this stage the fill of the backdrop looks quite fake and not believable. To solve this issue I introduced noise to the content aware fill layer that matched the noise of the camera on the subjects. This creates the illusion that this is a flat image. That concludes all the photoshop steps now I am back in Lightroom. I used RNI(Really Nice Images) film simulations and toolkit to achieve the look of Portra 400. I find this film stock represents the Gregory Crewdson look quite nicely (they didn't have 160). RNI has really nice grain profiles so I used a 400 medium sized grain to complete the image.

Conclusion: 

This was certainly my most ambitious project yet and I have plans to keep this style of photomontage going. I plan on getting a 60megapixel camera in the future and this would double the amount of detail I could pull. Staged photography has definitely become apart of my practice and is something I want to keep doing.