Digitally manipulating photographs that I took in Walsall and Birmingham

Continuing with my earlier theme of placing landscapes behind  street signs or different textures, I decided to do this with my Walsall and Birmingham photographs as I had not yet used them in my work. I used the same program to do this - Gimp.

For this manipulation, I placed a photograph of the sky behind two red telephone boxes on a street. As telephone boxes are not in use anymore, they were locked and I thought it was a shame that you couldn't go in them because they are a significant English motif. However, the telephone boxes in London are still open, so must be for tourist reasons. I decided to replace the telephone boxes with the sky as I think that they will be removed from our streets one day. I moved the top image to a position that shown the most tonal contrast in the clouds. Seeing as it was quite a cloudy day, it almost represents my thoughts towards them not being in use anymore as I think we should hold onto the icons that we are known for as a nation, along with items such as red double decker buses and the British bulldog.

This is an example of where I have combined nature with something that is manmade - a building. I took away the section of the bark that was green in colour to reveal a building underneath. There is a van underneath the part of the building that arcs over the road which I included as the red stripes contrast the green areas on the building. Furthermore, the red stripes are at the same angle as the detail on the building and so a harmony is formed between these two objects. Having the sky on display at the top is a gentle reminder that we, as man kind, have placed these ornate buildings within nature and makes the link between the background image and the foreground image less harsh.

This is a photograph of a New Street sign with a photograph of New Street behind it. At first I was going to only reveal New Street itself where the letters in the sign were, but due to the letters only covering a small area, it wouldn't have been very noticeable. So instead, I used a different technique that I hadn't done before, whereby I selected the background colour too and removed this section. This then meant that more of the photograph in the background was on display and you could still make out the street name as the shadows that the lettering made is still showing the outline of the words. I tried to keep with the same colour palette that is seen on the plant pot to the right, so I selected a photograph that included blue sky and a stone building, thus creating harmony within the manipulation. Also, the lines on the plant pot are at angles so I kept this in mind and recreated this idea when placing the photograph to show the diagonal shape of the building.

The way that I have been digitally manipulating photographs is similar to the way a stencil works, therefore I could look at making some stencil to use in my experiments with different mediums or when studying an artist. I think I could use this idea in Mark Tobey's studies to fragment multiple sections and to add another abstract feature to the studies. Furthermore, I could stencil lettering and objects onto my Chila Burman experiments, I think this would allow me to form bold areas in my responses, similar to how she makes loud statements.