In my first year at uni they gave us one simple task: use photoshop to edit a photograph. It could be any photograph and you could do anything to it. So I decided to do this:
This type of photography is called chronophotography. It consists in showing the different phases of movement in one single photograph. It has been around for some time, being used for the first time in the Victorian era. Mostly, this kind of photography was used for scientific purposes, specifically for the study of locomotion. Some examples are:
Both these series of photographs and compositions were created by Eadweard Muybridge.
In my case I wanted to combine the phases in one photograph:
(Photo above is also by Eadweard Muybridge)
This is nothing new, we are quite accustomed to seeing this kind of composition. However, I was curious as to how this kind of editing was done and therefore, I choose it for my proyect.
As it was the first time I was using Photoshop, I created this composition by:
First of all I took various photographs of the action in question (in this case, a horse jumping)
Once I had opened them all in Photohop, I chose one to be the base and background (the one with the horse on the very left hand side) and then i very roughly cut the horse out of the rest and deleted the rest of the pictures.
I tidied up the edges of the four horses.
And this way I started playing around with Photoshop and it's variety of tools. Since them I have come a long way in my editing, but the only way I managed this was by playing around a bit and experimenting for myself.