Photomontage - Sweet Dreams

              When we were first given this assignment, I struggled to come up with creative ideas for my photomontage. I knew that I wanted to capture something that involved movement but wasn’t sure exactly what that should be. When I was lying in bed later that night, a thought came to my mind; why not take photos of someone while they are sleeping? Now that sounds a little creepy but try not to think about it like that. If you have ever seen a small child toss and turn in their sleep, you can’t help but wonder what they are dreaming about or what kind of stresses they had during the day. That is the type of emotion I wanted to capture in my photos.

                Of course, I didn’t actually want to spend hours watching someone while they were sleeping and take photos. So I asked my boyfriend if he would be my model and pretend he was sleeping in his bed while I capture the pictures on my camera. I had an image in my head of looking down at the person on their bed but in order to make this work, I had to stand on a ladder and take photos. This was a little tricky because it was hard to keep my hands in the same spot, like a tripod would. It all worked out though.

                For editing purposes, I had to take a picture of the bed by itself to have as my base layer in Photoshop, so I did that. Then I started pulling in pictures of the various sleeping positions and using the Select Tool to cut around just the body and make a new layer via copy. This project really helped me advanced my editing skills in Photoshop and try out new features like blending, erasing, and adjusting opacity. I wanted one sleeping position to be the focal point and the rest to show up as ghostly images to present the implication of time passing. I also really liked having a white background as negative space around the bed, but decided to add blocks of color that tied in with the photo to help break up the space so it didn’t appear as if the bed was just magically floating. I’m very happy with my final result.