To continue my project in connections, and following my mid-point mind map where I narrowed down my concept to the connection between outdoors/indoors, and in that - people and objects, I wanted to do a photoshoot where I captured both of these environments and combined them together.
For the shoot, I checked the weather forecast, aiming for a sunny and dry day, then planned my shoot around that. I shot a variety of natural elements such as leaves, flowers, trees, keeping a look out for objects with recognisable silhouettes and interesting textures. I also moved a number of leaves and plants onto a more distinguishable background such as the pavement as I knew I would want to remove the background of some of these images and wanted to make that process easier. The conditions were as I hoped, therefore natural light was strong and I adjusted my shutter speed and ISO throughout the shoot to work alongside the light. I began with a shutter speed of 1/125 and an ISO of 400, this worked well for the majority of the shoot however, when photographing the sky I had to let a lot less light into my camera and therefore increased the shutter speed and aperture to 1/250 and f/9, and decreased the ISO to 100. On the other hand, when photographing plants and natural objects in the shadows or lower light, I increased the ISO working between 500-600 and decreased the shutter speed and aperture to 1/100 and f/5.6.
When moving to the indoor part of the shoot, I knew I wanted to capture wide scenes and 'home-like' objects. I started with wide shots of different rooms in my house including things like the sofa, tv, kitchen counter, etc. I then wanted to focus on objects with words and labels. I photographed shoe boxes with the brands on the sides, perfumes also with their names and brands, and also posters and art around the house. To tie in the home-like feeling as much as possible I wanted to make sure I was taking photos of everyday objects in which I usually might ignore - this led me to photograph the inside of cupboards, showing things like mugs and food, and also pin boards with papers and notes. I definitely found the indoor section of the shoot more challenging than the outdoor - however, I wanted to keep pushing out of my comfort zone and typical style of nature to explore more avenues of photography and not take any lateral creative moves.
After shooting, I uploaded my images to lightroom where I chose my favourites and edited them fairly minimally, focusing on things like levels, clarity and colour. I didn't want the images themselves to feel or appear largely edited before I combined them together as I wanted to carry forward the authentic and relatable feeling of the images and their contents. To combine the images together, I started in canva, removing the backgrounds of most outdoor images to later experiment with. I then moved to photoshop where I paired images together based on their compositions, layout, and contents - choosing fairly busy images to be paired with a simple leaf silhouette, or a landscape image of my living room with a natural element wide enough to hold it.
I used the clipping mask tool to create the overlay effect, adding indoor images over the top of the outdoors and experimenting with the different overlay types available in clipping masks. Once the images were combined, I worked with their colours and either edited one or both of them black and white. I felt this gave the images a more balanced and approachable effect as some were quite busy and hard to understand on first glance.
I also went on to use full images of natural elements still with their backgrounds and layered those over images of the indoors instead. I found I could only do this with a select few images that worked together well such as flowers and foliage. In particular, I combined the perfume image with a frame full of flowers, aiming to target the viewers sense of smell and emphasise the connection between not only the environments in general but the way in which we experience them similarly through senses.
Overall, I'm happy with how they turned out - I feel that they are visually appealing whilst also relating to my project and pushing it further. The household objects like mugs and shoe boxes paired with natural outdoor elements help highlight the connection in which I am trying to present, and this technique allows me to show that in singular images as opposed to images placed next to each other. I also think if I carried this experiment forward, I could enhance the quality and intention behind each image to further the idea of connection.