MIRROR
This is my image "Mirror" for the final surreal project. It tells a dark, creepy, and suspenseful story.
I was thinking of using a body mirror for the project but I thought it was too strange to just stand in front the mirror and it could be hard to take photos if I use the body mirror. So, later I changed my idea to use to smaller make up mirror which is much smaller. I planed to do eye shadow in front the mirror but don't look at it, this action was reasonable because the eye shadow plate itself has a little mirror on it.
The tools I used to take photos are mirror, table lamp, phone, phone holder, desk, and some make ups. I tried both of the mirrors I have but the smaller one works better since the angle could be adjusted.
It was much harder than I thought to find a right angle and position to take photos since there is not much space around my desk. I first tried portrait but didn't work out since my head and the mirror were too over lapped. Landscape works much better but still took a while to figure out the right position of me holding the eye shadow plate and the right angle of mirror.
Finally, I got these two photos for editing in Adobe Photoshop. My face was really close to the table lamp to created a light contrast between the face in the mirror and the actual face.
After using mask to combine those two photos, I added many filters and adjustments on it to darken the color, raise the light contrast, cooler the color tone, and sharp the image in general. Since the first final image on the left side looks somehow messy and I couldn't crop out those things on the left because of the image itself to match the 11*17 size, I changed the background color to black and added another layer mask on the of it, and used brush tool to blur the edge and darken the left side of the image more. The image on the right is the final image I had.
