All About Team Effort

(Photographs by Brian Yee)

(A larger image may be seen at http://oi52.tinypic.com/2jafc4p.jpg)

Initially, I had wild plans for my collage. In my mind, I imagined music, video clips, and pictures all incorporated into one piece that exposed the rich variety of hip-hop dancing. However, I was later inspired by a topic that was much closer to my heart. After a visit with my former high school track team, I decided to take my collage in a completely different direction.

At that point, I knew that I wanted to create a more traditional photograph collage. While I had no prior experience with image editing programs, I thought I might dive into a new challenge. In the beginning, I felt overwhelmed with all the possible effects that were available and the use of different image layers. In a way, the many options that technology offered made me feel trapped. I saw that I could take the collage in many different directions, and I simply had no idea how to get started. At first, I considered avoiding this obstacle by switching to the old paper and scissors method. After some thought, however, I realized that printing out the photographs, and cutting and pasting them might be a waste of my time and materials.

The original photos I used to create the top center image in my collage.

Once I gathered the photographs that I wanted to use, I realized that I was not sure how I wanted to blend them into one image. When I began playing around with Paint.NET’s various effects, I tried one out called “ink sketch.” This effect allowed me to customize the ink outlines of the photographs, as well as the amount of coloring in each of them. Essentially, it turned photographs into images that appeared illustrated. When I continued to work with “ink sketch,” I saw that it allowed me to combine photographs into a more unified picture. This is seen at the top left of my collage, in which I used three different photographs to make one longer image. I tried to make it appear as though the different groups of competitors were running one behind the other, which was easier to accomplish with this particular effect. I also used this technique for the top middle image, in which I placed two candid photographs side by side to create a single picture.

I also had the option of merging together all the separate images through fading effects and by altering their transparencies. In the end, however, I created a more comic book-like feel to my collage by keeping the photographs defined in clearly boxed shapes. At the same time, I noticed that I could have cut and pasted the photographs by hand and still accomplished the same basic formatting of my collage. Nevertheless, I feel that working with the photographs digitally was more time efficient and less tiresome. Instead of carefully cutting each photograph in a clean straight line, I was quickly able to “cut and paste” each image with a just a few clicks. Although in the end, using technology to create my collage was very useful and efficient, I must admit that I was only able to utilize it by keeping my plans simple. There were certainly more effects and techniques that I could have used, but I decided to take baby steps when it came to manipulating and working with digital images.