"Levitation"

When it comes to photography, there has always been one area I have struggled to grasp, an area almost essential in modern photographic practice, Photoshop. I can quite comfortably work my way around retouching my images, but CREATING on Photoshop has sadly been a constant gray area. Despite having a strong like of Surrealism and ingeniously Photoshopped images, I have never managed to develop my skills.

So when the task of Levitation was set, I really had no idea what to do. This blog post is going to be reasonably short, with little more to talk about than bananas.

Yeah... bananas. My idea of a solution to a create block during the task of levitation. Despite being very unhappy with the image, I will show and explain, and hopefully give a confidence boost to others knowing that they could do a better job, and that ALL photographers have bad shots.

To do this shoot I set up a tripod in my kitchen, facing at a slight angle above the banana. The idea was that the banana itself would be standing on its peel, with floating cut out chunks. The whole standing on the peel thing didn't work, so excuse the strange appearance of a mis-aligned plate.

 

 

The first shot is of an empty plate. This was to be used as the base layer. Next, I peeled the banana and placed it on an up-side-down white ashtray. I then made cuts in the banana, taking a shot each time I made a cut, similar to making a stop motion film. I then thoroughly enjoyed the "fruits of my labour".

Simple as that with the shooting, time to edit. I shot this task in JPEG because I knew the exposure was fine, and I could not be bothered to save each one to JPEG during post-processing.

I opened a blank page on Photoshop, measuring 5000px by 5000px, giving me more than enough room to edit. I then loaded all of the images into Photoshop, and stacked them perfectly on top of one another.

I then hid all shots except the base layer and the banana layer. Using layer masks, I removed the ashtray and all of the banana fruit. I then added each layer one by one, working backwards to build the banana.

To do this I used layer masks, using a black brush to completely remove each layer, and then using a white brush to bring back areas of the banana. When doing this I needed the shot of the cut to be seen, I had to match the shape of that cut with each banana slice.

Once  the image was done I flattened the layers and altered the tones of the entire image. This is the result.

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