Rationale

For my self-portrait ‘Who am I? No clue’ I created a partly surreal look into my self-identity through the photographic medium. This image is backed onto a collage of my own work that features my friends and favourite moments.

I began by brainstorming what makes me who I am. I listed my interests including music, photography, 3D compositing and art and decided which ones to include in the piece. After brain storming several concepts I began circling around the same idea of incorporating my old photographs into a montage that would better explain who I am. The layout I came up with was heavily inspired by photographic collage featured on the inside of Sublime’s album ‘Everything under the Sun’. The montage is made up of around one hundred photographs, taken from their garage band day’s right till their separation. I wanted to recreate a similar theme into my work, incorporating pictures that ranged from years ago to present and also hints to my possible future.

To aid the composition of my work I decided to give it a main subject. I came up with the idea of using a photo of my head and from it creating a door that opened to the inside. This would symbolise how I am still unsure of quite of whom I am yet.

I began doing this byasking Meghan to take twopictures of me, one from the front of my face and the other of the right. We did this in front of a white projector sheet to ensure I could edit around my head easily. I then imported these photos into Photoshop to correct them both.I did this firstly using the Curves Tool and then through Colour Balance Tool to remove the blue colour cast by the neon lights. I then proceeded to roughly map out where the hole would be using the Pen Tool. This gave me a better idea of composition.

I cut the a segment out of the side photo of my face, first approximately using the Polygonal Lasso Tool and then more intricately using the Magnetic Lasso Tool. I positioned the new cropped segment over the original photo roughly where it would sit. Using this information I then created an alpha channel so I could easily crop the collaged images around my head. This was particularly hard around my hair which I eventually had to scale back to achieve a realistic edge.

I thenbegan collecting my favourite photos from my computer which I felt had captured some of my happiest moments.  These include photographs from the National Folk Festival, New Year’s Eve and my trip to Dream World. I then imported them into Photoshop and placed them into the background. To give them a unique style I used a reference photo to Clone Tool a torn edge onto the images.This gave the appearance as if they had been ripped from a book or album. I also changed features of each image such as Colour Balance or Halftone Sketch Filter to make them look less uniform. To complete the collage I added pictures of my aspirations such as the Volkswagen and the Gibson Les Paul to hint at the possible future.

Finally I imported the image into the open source program Blender 3D. I modelled a simple interior to my head and an edge to fit around the door of my head. I made sure the lighting was correct and applied Ambient Occlusion to give it a more realistic feel.Once imported back into Photoshop I edited them into the image to appear as if they were originally part of the photo. To do this I also drew hair with the Brush Tool over the opening to make it look more realistic.