At the end of October I was to visit Thailand for seven weeks which was fantastic but unfortunately meant that I had to miss several course sessions. Before leaving, however, we had been looking at examples of juxtaposition and had been given our next project based upon this.
I went complete with several ideas, my digital camera and battery charger, notepad and pencil (not much room for many clothes)!! I was able to capture some lovely images which upon my return was able to put to good use.
Myth versus Reality
On a previous trip abroad I had managed to photograph a pair of elephants standing side by side.
Upon passing a hotel in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, I noticed that their ‘ grand entrance’ consisted of a pair of stone carved elephants facing each other, separated by an ornate waterfall. I realised that by combining the two photographs I would have a great example of juxtaposition. Using photoshop I cropped and combined the images and adjusted the lighting and this is my end result.
Time flies
For this part of the project I planned to use a background of a world map partially covered by an aeroplane coming in to land featuring clocks as its’ headlights. With smaller aeroplanes circling around the world in all shapes and sizes. I downloaded an image of a world map. Took photographs of numerous clocks on my travels including one in Thai numerals but was disppointed that try as I might I could not get a photograph of a ‘plane in the position I required. For much of the time their was an air strike in Thailand so no presence and when at airports the ‘planes were either being re-fuelled or I was not able access. I, therefore had to resort to scanning an image from a magazine and altering it in photoshop. I am not entirely satisfied with my end results, the world map is rather insipid although I did strengthen the colour and the resulting image is not as inspiring as I wished it to be.
I decided to use the Tsunami for the third subject. I thought of several ideas but felt that they were rather flippant to represent such a huge disaster. I settled for a beautiful evening sunset which I captured in Thailand. To the side of the picture I placed part of an image of a waterful Ihad photographed in Wales, to represent a giant wave and looking over the whole scene I placed the image of a Buddha which I made quite opaque.
