Creative Digital Montage

The above images are the result of the digital montage project:

• planning the montage and selecting materials - my focus of interest for this project was Northern Quarters area due to its cultural and social vividness and diversity. The plan involved walking around the area and shooting images of places which were in some way unique or peculiar, for example, graffiti, sculptures and posters. The second phase of the plan involved going through the images and selecting most relevant images. The final phase of the plan consisted of using selected images (or their parts) to digitally montage three new images which portray complex nature of the atmosphere in the Northern Quarters area.
• having research numerous contributors in creative digital montage, I was inspired by James Van Der Zee. Although he was active well before digital imagery was popular and widespread, one of his mottoes was 'I wanted to make the camera take what I though should be there'. Therefore, I used this as guidance in producing what clearly is a more mental image of the Manchester city centre.  
• the message and the audience - the digitally montaged images aim to demonstrate uniqueness of the area on different levels and in many respects. On the one hand, we have plenty of small pubs with local bands performing every night. On the other, we have exhibitions and street life (visible in graffiti, posters, mosaics, wall paintings and street artists). The area also has a social dimension, with many bazaar vendors trying to sell, for instance, second-hand music equipment. The target audience for this project is anyone who is interested in exploring the Manchester city center not only in person but also through the lenses of a camera. The target audience also involves those who want to see a different view of Manchester city centre, i.e. as a collage of images and memories. 
• images selected for the project - out of numerous photos taken for this project, seven were selected on the basis of common theme, i.e. representations of art. In this case, the photos involved those representing historic buildings, graffiti, sculpture and music instrument, so these elements which somehow evoke an aesthetic response in the viewer's mind. 
• image editing and manipulation techniques - masks and layers were the two main Photoshop features which I used in this case. These enabled me to combine (elements of) two or more images to create a new one. For example, in the second image, we have three elements (layers): the view of historic buildings, the guitar and a dragon sculpture. The masking techniques (and 'opacity level' feature) appeared to be useful in blending three images into one, in this way allowing me to show three items which normally do not occur in their vicinity, such as a massive red guitar in the foreground of the image. Faded faces in the pictures mean that Manchester also has a social dimension, i.e. its inhabitants, but they are by no means the main one, since the city also lives its own life thanks to its cultural (music) artifacts and historic buildings in the city centre. 
• Moreover, cropping and re-sizing were useful features enabling me to  adjust the size of the given element to fit the whole image. For instance, in the last image, the faded image of the guitar had to be adjusted in terms of size so that it does not go beyond the image and that it constitutes effective (yet faded) background to the graffiti image. This also required using a bit of sharpening so that segments of the image were more conspicuous. Finally, colour manipulation turned out to be exceptionally useful because the montage was done from both b&w pictures, as well as coloured ones. The mixture of colours (and colour modes) contributed to the vivid and abstract character of the images, even though most of them are kept in cold tones.