Blog Entry #5: "A Day in the Life of A Mercy Student" Collage

"Where girls with dreams become women of vision." This Mercy Academy slogan describes where each and every student comes from at Mercy Academy.

To your right, is a collage in what we call, "A Day in the Life of A Mercy Student." As I created this collage, I wouldn't have been able to done it without photoshop. Photoshop is a program where you can edit different kinds of photos and use different tools to make that photo look better than it did before. In my collage I used different kinds of tools. One tool I used was combining images. Combining images allows you to take 3 different pictures and make them into one. To make the combining images tool work you have to make sure the 3 images have a least 40% of the last picture taken overlapped. Also when you are taking the 3 images, do not move your feet, but turn your body. The picture I used the "combining images" tool on is the long picture of Catherine McAuley. Another tool used was scaling each picture by using the layers tools. The scaling tool allows you to resize your picture to the size you wish it to be. I used this tool on every picture in the collage. Another tool I used was the lasso tool. This tool let me get the picture to a shape I wanted it cropped to. As you can see this tool was used on a mercy student walking with her shadow, and of the two mercy students walking down the staircase. On some pictures, such as the Cathrine McAuley picture and the picture of the two students walking down the staircase was cropped. The crop tools let's me get the part of the picture I wish to use. This tool unlike the lasso tool stays a rectangle, and does not change the shape of the picture like the lasso tool did. Lastly, another tool I used in my collage was the magic wand tool. This is a selection tool that allowed me to darken the picture of the two students praying in the chapel.

This collage doesn't only use photoshop tools, but as well as photography elements we have learned in the couple past weeks. Elements used were picture in motion and rules of thirds. A picture in motion used was the picture of the two mercy students walking down the staircase. A picture that uses rules of thirds was the Cathrine McAuley picture. While the top of the statues head in intersected by the top line, it shows how rules of thirds works.

So as I have just explained how Photoshop and photography of elements are used, we can conclude that I have learned many important aspects of Photoshop and why picture taking can be important in some ways.