Keep Working the Montage: Another Liberty

 

After writing about montage work yesterday, I kept working with a few different images of the Statue of Liberty. I find that the more I concentrate on just a small group of images the more ideas that pop up--it limits your picture choices and forces you to find new ideas with a limited palette. This is a montage of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline (both shot the same weekend) and it's totally just an experiment to try a few things. Essentially I used the method described yesterday--dragging one image (the skyline) onto the background image (the statue). I then made hue/saturation and selective color adjustments (to the overall montage and to each image) and then played with the blending modes until I found one that I liked (I ended up using linear light). But at this point the statue wasn't coming through strong enough, so I duped the background layer (Command J on a Mac) and again played with blending modes until Liberty's face come through more powerfully. Just by coincidence it was the same blending mode--linear light. 

I don't know if this is a finished product or not (I kept one version with the layers open so I could go back and play more--a good idea if you're not positive you're done) but it has a kind of poster/graphic quality that I like. The skyline background is pretty abstract and you might not really know what it is, but I still think it has a bit of an urban/modern look. The fun thing about doing this is that you learn more about the tools you're working with and you create some fun colorful images along the way. And there's no right or wrong, so it's all just fun. We had a great weekend photographing the Statue of Liberty and exploring and I'm having a lot of fun going back and pulling more out of the images. In fact, I shot nearly 1,000 photos in three days, I think, so I'll be playing with them for a long time!