Photomontage

I created this poster as a way to bring awareness to the fact that we are ruining many of the world’s paradises by overdevelopment. I am in the Caribbean right now vacationing in Saint Thomas. I was inspired when I looked down the beautiful shorelines here and saw all of the development. I stopped and thought about how much more beautiful it would be without all of the development.

All of the photos in this montage are stock photos that I had from various web projects that I have worked on. I started with a photo of a shoreline with ominous clouds. I tweaked the saturation and luminance of the sky and sand to give it a more ethereal feel, by making the sky darker and the sand an almost other-worldly color. I then took a picture of the throgs neck bridge at sunset and used the select color range and the refine edge tools to remove the sunset from behind the bridge. I then placed the bridge and duplicated the beach layer and masked out the sky so that I could place the bridge behind the Water and make it appear as if the bridge was rising out of the water. I also took a picture of a large building and did the same as the bridge, this time I masked the water and the sky to make it appear as if it was coming from the shore line. I changed the blending mode of the bridge and building to overlay, to make them feel as what may be to come and not necessarily what is. I then added the road and made the perspective seem as if the road and sand went on forever. I also added street lights which I took from another photo that I had. The lights were off on the lamps so I duplicated the layer and masked out the bulbs, then I played with the levels to make it look like the bulbs we on and burning power in the middle of the day. I added the grand central sign and kept the size just larger than it should be to make the image feel that much more cluttered by human building. I also added the dead trees to give it another layer of depressed feelings. I also kept the bridge and building much larger than the perspective of the road to give them a colossal looming feeling.

I hope everyone enjoys my work. I put quite a bit of time into it.