Vintage Photo Project

A couple weeks back, our photography assignment was to imitate a tutorial that we had found.I’m a big fan of what Jane Long  and Maggie Taylor have been doing with old photographs and I have some how-to’s and came up with this

For our final project, we had to create five new images using photoshop techniques we had learned throughout the semester. Since I really enjoyed colorizing this vintage photo and doing something weird with it, I decided to buy a bunch of vintage prints off of ebay and gave it more of a try.

What I learned: that shit is hard. I mean, first, you’ve gotta cut out those images from the background. Then, you’ve gotta colorize them in a way that is both interesting AND realistic. But the hardest part is coming up with some cool setting for them. I discovered that I don’t have much of an imagination in this regard. But here’s what I came up with.

This is probably my least favorite. I’m not even sure what’s wrong with it. I like the fact that the picture of the house is one of my own (taken during a recent visit to CT), but there’s something off about it. Perhaps it’s that the cutouts are too vivid compared to the washed out setting?

And this one I had such high hopes for this one because the kids in the picture were already so damn creepy.

But I don’t really like it either. Colors are nice, but the setting is all wrong, right? Needs to be more surreal? And I don’t like that it’s not my picture.

This one is sort of getting closer to what I wanted.

but again none of the images is mine–they’re all just free stock, which to me means that the picture itself isn’t really my creation.

This one’s getting a bit closer to what I’m aiming for.

but I don’t think it’s got enough. The only one I really kind of dig is this one

though I will probably revise to make the reflection weirder.

Anyway, though I really struggled to get really weird, I did enjoy the project, and I think I would like to create a whole series of these, but much improved. Hopefully, when my brain is less cluttered, I’ll be able to get a little creepier. Suggestions for weirdness?