Fire Station "Joiner"

    For my class this week our assignment is to do a "joiner".  It's basically a collage of photos put together to recreate the whole in an abstract or sometimes cubist style.  Last week we studied the work of David Hockney who first created this art.  One of the links to his work is www.hockneypictures.com so you can see what a real joiner looks like.  We created our joiners on Photoshop as compared to Hockney who used printed photos.
   I both enjoyed and struggled with this assignment for many reasons.  On my first attempt, my photos were too precise.  I used my tripod and adjusted the exposure and focal length so that I captured the entire scene as carefully as possible (I took over 200 images).  What I created was a fairly precise reproduction of the image, but not the least bit interesting (I've included it here....it's a park bench).  Then I read some on-line articles about how to create this type of art and realized that the "art" of it is to change the exposure, perspective and angle of the camera to give the work a more abstract look.  So, I did that with the photographs I took for this image of the Fire Station on Laurel Lane.  I was able to "flatten out" a three dimensional scene and I made the fire engine larger and used a different perspective for it to make it a more prominent subject.
   I also wanted to do St. Mary's church and the Vietnam Memorial, but the scene was very spread out and I didn't take enough "in between" photos to make a cohesive whole. I still want to do that scene, but I'll need to take some additional photographs to make it work to way I envision.
  Of course for all three of these attempts I only spent about 30 minutes to an hour at each site.  I read an article about Hockney spending 8 weeks just to get the images for one of his works.   I took 57 shots for this "Fire House" project and ended up, after hours of trial and error) only using 19 of them.  It was like putting together a puzzle and I enjoyed the mental challenge of that aspect of the assignment.  I have to admit, though, that it really messed with my brain.  Part of me - my left-brain analytical, judgmental part - wanted it to fit together perfectly while the other part of my brain - my right side artistic, creative part - wanted it to look more abstract.  I was surprised at how difficult it was to reconcile these opposing mindsets.

   Do I love the end result?  No, not particularly.  I'm probably not interested enough in this art form to do a lot of it and can't see hanging this in my house, but the project was challenging and I learned a great deal about Photoshop and myself in the process.