Egg Juggling

For my next idea, I thought I would try something away from what I had already tried, and decided to still continue this hybrid theme, but instead of animals, try food. My initial idea was to add faces to eggs, but then I thought to develop this into something a bit more surreal than just a box of eggs. I decided that I could have someone juggling eggs, and these eggs could have their own personalities.

The photos in the presentation below are a few of the initial shots I took of my juggler subject. I decided to make the focus of the photo the biggest egg, and the one closest to the camera. These were obviously going to be added in afterwards, but that meant that the background would be slightly less focused than the foreground, using depth of field.

As you can see the photos vary in levels of focus, so I could experiment with this in the editing and manipulating process. The final background photo I decided to use was the final photo in the slideshow. So my next step was to take the photos of the eggs and the faces I wanted on the eggs. 

The message I wanted to show was about juggling with your personal problems, or just generally juggling with life. This is further shown through the idea of eggs, because you have to be very careful with them as they are fragile. Therefore I used the same subject for the faces as I did the eggs because I felt that this would further this idea that it's your own problems. 

The egg photos were taken against a white background which meant it was very easy to remove them from that when adding them to the main photo. I carefully selected these, copying them over into the main image, and placed them where I wanted them in the image. I had already had one egg in the subjects right hand, so (going with the standard three ball idea) I just needed the two more. My next thought before adding the faces was that these eggs wouldn't be stationery, therefore needed to be in motion. I then took advantage of the motion blur tool. The egg closer to the background I made quite blurred because I thought this one would be heavily in motion whilst the one closer to the camera needed to be the focus, and therefore almost in  focus. 

I wanted the faces to be a mixture of fear/fright at being thrown almost carelessly into the air and also excitement, but still sort of comical. The photos above are of the faces I took. I only needed two, but I wanted to try a variety of them out before deciding on which to put into the photo. The capture to the left is how I removed the faces before placing them in the final image. I then used the various tools to adjust and fit them in accordingly. I used the eraser, clone tools, and the gradient tools to fit them in well. To highlight areas I also used the Dodge/Burn tool too.

The final image can be seen below and I think it worked very well to portray the message I had the idea of showing. And, was effective in showing a wide range of tools used in the editing process, composing the picture very well.