Assignment 2: Recreate Again

For my portrait recreate, I decided to work off a surrealist photograph titled Afterlife. It's more of a composite photograph, where I wound up spending more time editing than taking the original photographs.

I tried to get as close the the original as possible, but that became a little tricky to reproduce digitally. The original feels like it was done through traditional techniques, so I guess the challenge for me was to try to put my "hand" back in the process. I tried adding some noise and blowing out sections of the photo to match the original, but I still feel like the "digitalness" is too apparent in the photo. In retrospect, I lit my subject from both the front and the side, but now I'm wishing I only used the side light to increase the contrast.

Lesson learned, I guess. There's only so much you can do while editing, and I'm now realizing how important it is to get everything perfect in the original shots. I had a lot of fun experimenting with this surrealist angle, and it's really sparked my interest in trying to make mor

e photo composites like this in the class.