STEP BY STEP TELL A NEW STORY WITH LIBRARY SHOTS
From choosing your theme and approach to unifying the images’ look and feel, here’s how to take a re-invention project from screen to print
1 Define the theme of your story
Keep the story simple. Define and shape the story you wish to tell, and get it down to one simple line. For this project, which I was going to print out, my brief was ‘Images with great sky and colour plus flat water’. Using Lightroom’s Collections feature, I put all the images that could be used into a folder, then started removing ones that didn’t sit well together in terms of composition, tone, balance and, above all, story. Eventually, I finished up with 20 images for editing.
2 Tidy up images if required
Since this project is about re-purposing existing images into a new context, you may have to do a little bit of editing work along the way. This could be cropping in to steal a portion you need – in the above examples, the section of sea and sky to the left of the lighthouse and the sea and sky to the left of the rocks, are ideal – or something a little more involved. Another shot of a dog playing on a sandy beach made the final cut, but the dog had to be cloned out.
3 Apply a common edit across the selection
Having determined the look for this project at the outset, my final images all needed to have the horizon line in the same place and the same square crop applied. As my final selection consisted of a variety of un-processed and processed images, I decided to give them a more uniform look by applying a creative effect. In this example, I used the Motion Blur filter in Photoshop to replicate the feel of intentional camera movement photography.
4 Print out and display your new story
Printing is a vital element of my photography world. This project was printed out at 10 x 10cm, and mounted as a collage in a frame. I knew at the outset of this project that I wanted to frame the images in this way; this helped shape the editing and selection phases, as I required images that would live together. The frame and mounting boards that were cut out dictated that I needed 20 images that all worked together. This is one of many great ways to create wall art with real impact.