Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Fuzzy Jaws: A Senior Surreal Photo by Jack Marquez (2013)

During the surrealist unit, I noticed that very few pieces we studied incorporated humor. In response, I tried to add some lightheartedness to my picture with a happy plush shark puppet. To help the HDR effect, I photographed the shark inside a small softbox with even lighting from two small lamps, which brought out the fluffy texture. I also photographed the shark from multiple angles to create the illusion of multiple individual sharks when I composited them into a single image. The scene inside the shark's mouth is a picture of my backyard swimming pool, also photographed in HDR. To make it seem like a shark was actually in the pool, I applied gaussian blur to make the shark appropriately out of focus, and sandwiched it between two low-opacity layers to add to the underwater look. Finally, I added a vignette around the entire photo to make it appear deeper in the shark's mouth. Once all of the elements were in place, I created a watery texture using various Photoshop rendering tools and filters, and added a purple tint. I then created a solid purple layer on top of everything, and lowered the opacity of that for a murky underwater feel. I also made a few minor changes to help ''realism,'' like making the background shark slightly out of focus, adding a darker gradient toward the bottom of the image and a light source in the top right.
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