Montage

Week 5

I'll bet you thought I'd never stop the black and white... but yes! Now it is green and white.

The idea here is that a collection of photographs can be more powerful than a single image. For my project I spent about 20 minutes on a walk from the house along the greenbelt in our neighborhood and photographed weeds, bushes, and trees that interested me with the preconceived notion of making a near monochromatic montage around the theme of leaves.

I fixed the aperture at 5.6 to reduce depth of field and let the camera choose shutter speed and ISO. Since it was late evening, most of the shutter speeds are 1/30 second and ISO is running 200 to 1000 or so. I might have chosen to shoot a little earlier and possibly get better light but this was guerilla photography and I was on a tight schedule. All shots were taken with a Nikon D3 (ISO 1000 is no problem) and a Nikkor 105 Macro VR so I could get close if wanted.

I've made montages before and posted them. See for example this one of cherry blossoms in Japan.

In all I took about 50 pictures. I selected the "best" and ran them through Photoshop to crop and get the resolution down. Cropping was random with respect to squares and rectangles - just whatever I thought might look good. On photos that were a bit "flat" I increased contrast and adjusted exposure with Levels. All processing was done on JPEGs.

Then I made a large blank canvas in Photoshop and sucked the pictures in as layers. I started in the middle and arranged the photos out roughly in a radial fashion in the same order I had imported them. The arrangement is supposed to look a bit like a leaf itself. I put a shadow under each photo and put a graduated green background behind it. There was too much yellow in some of the leaves to my eye (we have had a drought here) so I made a hue/saturation mask and reduced saturation in the yellows.

I gave it the very creative title of Suburban Leaves and stamped my name on it.

Idea based on Make a Montage, pages 72-73 in the book 50 Photo Projects, by Lee Frost