Cow/Man

 My next idea was to work with the animals closer to myself, which live on the farm I live on. My obvious choice to utilise was the cows since we have a large dairy herd. As I have already said, the idea of having animals as a subject is uncontrollable and unreliable when taking still photographs. Therefore I must take the animal shots first and work from there in order to incorporate the other body around this.

So next I took several images of the cows on the farm in the daylight in the hope that I may find some good shots from these, capturing interesting expressions I could mould the secondary subject around in a form where they are not necessarily motionless or posing for a conventional portrait. To the left are some of the photos I managed to capture.

The photos aren't the best examples of expression, however cows are notoriously timid and shy when up close, regardless of whether you have a camera. My favourite, and most expressive quite by chance the image above. It shows the cow to the left looking almost like it is pulling a funny childish tongue-in-cheek face. 

I decided I'd most like to adapt this one and decided that the second subject must be encorporated with the idea of this face, so I tried out a few different images with the subject's hands up continuing this expression. These can be seen below. 

The face of the cow I had chosen above I felt was very good, however I didn't think it was quite surreal enough to just combine the two in trying to portray a distinct expression. Therefore I used more of my gained PhotoShop skills to adapt this into a more cartoony, over exaggerated face. As you can see from the screen capture below, I carefully selected areas of the face such as the tongue and eyes and transformed them to a larger size, as well as adjusting various levels of colour shadow on certain parts of the head. Something else I did to ensure the cows head would fit in to the environment I had chosen was to remove the tag from the cows ear. I did this in a similar way to how I enlarged the ear. This was to select it, copy it, and to flip it over so that it covered the other ear, enlarging where necessary. Various areas of blemishes and farm dirt were also removed simply, using the clone tool. Next, I carefully cut around the head, using a light feathered edge so that it was not too sharp. Then I copied the head into the PSD containing the second subject. 

The most important part of combining these photos was to match the light levels as best I can within both the chosen photos. This was achieved using various PhotoShop tools, such as the levels tool, and the brightness/contrast tools. These helped to set the head into the picture without it looking too much of an abnormality. Another thing I did to help this, is that I created a layer mask over the top of a duplicate layer of the head, and made a gradient which got lighter the nearer to the window. This followed the direction of the sunlight. The final thing I needed to do was to copy and cut around the fingers of the background, and move them into the foreground on a new layer which created depth within the photograph. 

I think the final image (left) was a very efective experiment with capturing and adapting expressions. What I intended to create was a natural looking photo, but at the same time something that looked unnatural and surreal. I think I have achieved this very well and I want to develop this further, perhaps including multiple expressions, maybe people, and maybe even a series of photographs that work together. I feel at the moment this image is very good at portraying what I want to continue working toward, however this idea on it's own is not quite strong enough. Consequently, I want to develop this idea into something more substantial and experiment with the idea of story telling or a message like the work of Dalí or an ironic/comedic message, like Huet, within my photos.