This assignment made me laugh. Here is about 10 layers of pictures of myself merged into one picture. Again, I used the Photo Image Editor Pixelstyle app for MacOS to create this image. I did not like that it does not look like as many portraits as it is.

For my visual assignment I did Averaged Portrait which is rated 3 stars. For this I had to create a unconventional portrait. I decided to do Matthew Broderick from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This movie was made in 1986. This movie is about a guy named Ferris who skips a day of school and his principle is trying to catch him in the act. Ferris drives a Ferrari, which we don’t often see on the roads now. We also see Ferris using a landline which we don’t have much anymore, everyone now uses smartphones. I really liked this movie because of the story plot and the time it was based in.

The Process I researched some movies that were produced in the 80’s. Not knowing Ferris Bueller was produced in the 80’s, I quickly chose to do Matthew Broderick who plays Ferris in Ferris Buellers day off. I thought he did a great job in the movie. I then looked up some pictures of him from the movie and found one that I wanted to use. I then used GIMP to play around with his portrait. It was my first time using GIMP so it was hard to navigate through it. I still don’t know much about GIMP but I got to play around with it and I was able to produce the unconventional portrait above.

I cheated a little bit by not using Photoshop, rather I have an app for photo editing where layering photos is an option so I just used that instead of tear my hair out over Photoshop.  In total there are five shots to this piece thought you can’t see all of them that well.  I really like the layering technique for photos because the more you look, the more you see.  I chose these photos because the lighting was really good and I took the selfies generally from the same angle so there is some unifying character to them.  Two of the layers are of me brushing my teeth (if you can spot the toothbrush).  Overall I had a lot of fun doing this assignment.

So, things got weird with this one. I stumbled upon Averaging Concepts Using Flickr and decided to try it since I’d never averaged a photo before. But instead of using pictures found on Flickr, I thought it might be worth it to use a bunch of self portraits. I created the Averaged Portrait assignment to better suit my intentions and hopefully inspire others to experiment.

My goal was to take a series of self portraits, then compile them and end with my face blurry but my body still. I sat in front of a white wall, attached my phone to a small tripod, and then set the timer to 3 seconds so my arm wouldn’t be extended in the pictures. I took about 10-15 pictures of myself in the same position, only moving my head in different directions. Once I finished, I loaded them into Photoshop.

Since my body shifted slightly from hitting the shutter, I aligned the layers and cropped the jagged corners/excess space. I then converted the layers to a SmartObject and selected ‘Mean’ from the Stack Mode options. After that, I adjusted the color, brightness and contrast of the photo. It turned out pretty cool. I tried the ‘Range’ option next and inverted the colors — I liked how that came out even more than ‘Mean’! This was such a fun assignment. I really love the resulting images and I learned something new.