Photographic Truth Reflection

            This quarter’s assignment was called “Photographic Truth”. The point of this assignment was to pick a theme, find pictures related to that, and then insert your own pictures of yourself in those pictures. The point was to get people to think/look twice at the picture because they couldn’t believe you were in there because you made it so believable.  

                  The first thing you needed in order to do this project is find a theme that you wanted to use. The teacher suggested that you use a historical theme so that it can be relatable to other students. After you found a theme for the project, next you were to go online and find pictures of that theme. For example, I searched for pictures from the Beatles and Rolling Stones since that was the theme I chose to do. After you found your pictures, you were to take pictures of yourself in different poses that you chose that would fit in with each of your pictures.

                  To me, the phrase “photographic truth” means that not all the pictures you see are necessarily true. With the technology that we have available to us, we have to be careful with what we see; it is very simple to insert things to the real pictures and still make it look believable. The technology of today is amazing.

                  The theme for my project was 1960s music, and the two popular icons of this time are the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I had to do a lot of work in order to try to make my pictures look believable. I mainly dealt with color and texture for all my pictures. The tools I used for this project were the magnetic lasso, the crop tool, the move tool, the stamp tool, the magic wand, and the burn tool. I had to adjust the color by going to image, adjustments, and variations. To replace the color I went to image, adjustments, replace color. These were the main tools I used to complete my project. It sounds really simple, but this project actually took time and over all patience.

                  The reason for why I chose to do this theme was because I really like music, and the Beatles and Rolling Stones are one of those bands that don’t necessarily die out but are still alive with the youth of today. Another reason for why I chose this theme was because I would have loved to go back into the time when they were really popular. I would have loved to also sing along with them and travel. Putting myself in those pictures was a way for me to symbolize my presence with them. If I couldn’t be there in real life, at least I could be there in picture form. The thought of me being with these two bands is fun and really cool to me.

                 What I have learned about this project is that not all pictures that we see (especially on the internet) are true. Today it is very easy to change a picture and make it seem like something else was really happening. Something new that I learned to do in this project is to better use the stamp tool and to also change the color of my own pictures so that it matches with other pictures. Like I said before, this sounds really easy but can actually be a hard and tedious task. This was an assignment that I really did like. I learned something else to do on the amazing Apple computers. At the beginning I was frustrated that I could not think of a theme, but after I had a theme, everything else was good. I did find this project to be difficult because I really wanted the pictures to look believable. I did think I was successful in this project. Although you can tell where I am in each picture, I thought that I did a good job matching the colors and textures. If another person who did not know anything about the Beatles or Rolling Stones, I think they would very much believe that I was in the pictures. If I were to do this assignment all over again and had more time, I would work a little bit more on the color and trying to clean up the edges of each of my own pictures. Although you can’t really tell that much, these are things that I would like to perfect.