Editing 51°16’07.8 ″ N 3°01’32.4 ″ W
To begin with when editing my final image I started with the blank canvas, the background to the image. I then realised I should’ve photographed the sky so the image would be a lot longer. Instead, I just extended the sky in photoshop. I extended the sky in a sense by duplication the part I had flipped it vertically, then blending the tones in the sky to form one sky that looked like two. This was later extended again for the final image. I then started with my first building. It took a long time to find a good base image. To start with I had to pick a building that looked like it fit. That it could support the structure I was about to build above it that it was wide enough and looked sturdy. I went with this image the house is called Japonica Farm. It even had a cute little path that fit so well into the image.
Next I started juggling around the other images till I found one that looked natural that it fit in with the previous house. This second house was 176 Berrow road. I picked this because even when there were only two houses it looked completed in a way that, these two houses could exist in this way easily. I knew that it was the right house to pick but also that it I wasn’t done yet with the edit. The next thing I did was extend the path I did this the same way I extended the sky in the start of the edit. Just by duplicating the image, then as the path extended as it approached you I had to add more width to the path to make it look real. I then started playing with the composition of the background adding a sand dune. I was thinking it was a bit dull at first. I started to play with how would the landscape actually look if this house was here. I later removed the sand dune as I liked the simplicity it left the focus on the house. I also felt it upset the composition of the image. The third house added was 9 st. johns road at first it did not fit there was a car parked outside the house of the original image. So with the car I lost about a ¼ of the image. But by lowering it into the second house I added to the aesthetic that they were all connected this was one house connected.
I originally planned to have every house I had ever lived in. for this image, I then realised this was 14 houses and could not be done on one film roll which only had 12 shots. I then had to think strategically about which houses would be the most aesthetically pleasing to look at. I tried to pick houses that looked nice had a simple front to them. I wanted former homes with lots of windows and some which felt the most personal to me. Continuing the edit I then decided the third house looked a little too wonky and threw off the composition of the image. I then rotated it more into where it should belong if this was a proper building that existed in the world. I had taken a photo of one of the houses fences and had tried to add that into the other image to cover up the fact that ¼ of the third house was missing from the image. this however, did not work at all. I then decided to add one of the more basic house fronts from my images to work as a filler in a way to patch that gap and also to make sure I didn’t lose too much of the previous third house from the image. As the third house was being mostly lost in the image behind the point of the second. To finalise the creation part of the edit a added little touches to the house to make it seem real I added a dangling flower pot to one side then I added extra chimneys and aerials and antennas I then added telephone and electric wires of one side because how would this house function without electricity. I felt by adding all these little things it really helped pull the image together and make it appear real.
The Editing of the Light
after I was done editing the image from a structural point I then moved onto the lighting of the image. I felt if I could get all the different layers under a similar lighting then the image would pull itself together at the final part. I started by creating a sort of isosceles trapezoid on photoshop with the polygonal lasso tool. With this tool I could create a distinct path to put light in. Then by adjusting the curve in a new layer I could create my own light source and light path on the image. This however it a very blunt representation of light and tend to look cheap. So by adding a high gaussian blur to this layer the light looks a lot more natural and real. Then just repeated this step two more times making the trapezoid smaller each time with less blur with each one you can create your own light source and pick the direction of light on an image. (it’s also best to make the light slightly bigger than you assume it to be on the image and to consider the light that will hit the ground past the image. I then added the same as I had before for the light but in reverse to darken the image around the bottom corners to add a level of depth to the image. Finally as a last little touch I added a cloud filter. In Filter > render > clouds then on a low setting I had the cloud filler added to the image this comes across as a very blurry poorly done cloud replacement. But if it is extend you can get some real detail in the cloud filter it becomes more of a thin overlay on the image that again with the light adds a level of cohesion to the images.
