Correcting Photographing

I will feature something different for this post and that is my behind-the-scenes editing all my photos. The thing about photography is that what comes out in the photos is not all that, plainly speaking, truthful. It takes some adjustment of angles and lighting as well as eliminating certain props in the background to make it look 'perfect'.

Back in Year 2 of my university life, I have this class called Cognition and Perception. In short, we learned how our cognitive processes are carried out which influence our perception and vice versa. Our perception is a funny little bugger as it can trick us into 'perceiving' the wrong image (under certain settings of course).

Ok, enough jabbering. Here's a photo I took yesterday.

As you can see, Superman here looks like he's actually flying off to the sky and mind you, there's no photoshopping going on here.

Now, let's look behind the scenes and see what's really going on and how I made it looked as the figure is really flying.

There's a LEGO pole stuck to one of his leghole. See, this is how I take photographs that involve figures levitating above the ground. Sometimes, such attempt is difficult and some accomplices might be needed to take a really nice shot.

Now, I know this feels like cheating but that's what going on with most photography. The real full image is not always what it seems to be. It requires a good cropping skills or taking from a certain angle to hide the unwanted props. This has more to do with psychology than you think because by shielding certain items from a picture, it could totally change our perception of the image. For instance, the first photo of this post really does look like Superman figure is actually flying.

Thus, next time if you want to take a nice photographs but you have ugly props lying around, just position your minifigures so that when you shoot later on, you can crop out the unwanted bits. Of course, the angles help you out as well to hide the props.

With that, I bid you adieu.