Purpose:
To create a Clash of Cultures by creating your own Photo montage, combining images from Beijing, China and Yarmouth, Maine, USA;
To further develop your Photoshop knowledge and skills;
To create a “surreal” landscape by montaging a variety of photographs;
To know, use, and understand the Four Collage Techniques to in your Photo Montage: Juxtaposition/fragmentation, Point of View, Scale Change, Overlapping
Reflection:
I learned a vast amount from this project from both the successes and the challenges that I faced throughout my creation of this montage. I primarily learned a lot about photoshop. I was very successful in editing the various photographs to fit into my montage. The process of adjusting, cropping, and editing the pictures in order to juxtapose, layer, and contrast them in my final project greatly enhanced my understanding of the program. Due to my success with photoshop throughout the project, I am now actually quite comfortable using photoshop with different projects. I additionally had many initial challenges that I had to overcome, enforcing my problem solving skills. It was extremely difficult to incorporate fifteen images into my project in a way that was imaginary but also real at the same time. I had to maintain the real aspect of the surreal montage, which was something I found to be quite difficult while trying to integrate many different and contrasting images. I ultimately found ways to add in many different images without losing the sense of having a real scene in the montage. I added smaller fragments, and I decreased the opacity of some images to help them blend and juxtapose together smoothly. In the end, I learned a huge amount from this project, and it was definitely a highlight for me.
