Initial Ideas and First Photoshop session

Initial Ideas for Cyborg Compositing
Having looked at some research of cyborgs I will now explore the possibilities of what I will explore in my composites. In the initial briefing I got the following ideas/ starting points...

• Music- when listening to music a human becomes often totally engaged often adopting the mood of the song being listened to, it is an extension to the body when earphones or headphones are on the body. 
• Camera- when taking a photograph using a camera it enhances the abilities of the eye through enhanced focal points etc, this idea has been brought by Wafaa Bilals 3rd I that I previously looked at. 
• Cars- having in the briefing looked at early photo montages from people like Hannah Hoch (who I will look further at shortly) car parts seem to be a key theme. Again car enhance our travelling distances, music and other parts. 
• Olympics and the growing technology advantage athletes have. 

In this first session on the 31st of January we became familiar with functions and techniques on Photoshop.  I hadn't previously worked a lot with photoshop, I was able only to change general colour settings such as colour balance, levels and brightness. In the session I was able to become familiar with selection tools. I didn't really produce much work but I went away and tried some of the techniques. I have also become familiar with the clone tool for my edits.

In these edits I took a lot of inspiration from Wafaa Bilal, who had a camera implanted onto the back of his head as a third eye. I wanted to take the idea of  a humans eye becoming enhanced by technology when taking a photograph. the eye becomes advanced by the enhanced focal areas we can achieve, so this was what I based my edits on. I will take you through what I did for each edit and discuss the images I used to create each one. As it was very early in the project I used photographs off the internet, making sure the resolution was right in each.

I have taken this photograph as a starting point as the eye ball has quite a lot of power it almost looks bionic. I wanted to build parts of camera into the eye of the image mimicking the " photographers eye". Below are some examples using single or multiple images from the web, I wanted to particularly use camera lenses as they are circular and cogs as this imitates a mechanical enhancement. 

1st Edit

This is an image of a lens from Google images, I chose to use lenses as an object because of the circular shape, therefore fitting when inside a humans pupil. I previously chose another lens but found that was too cartoon like for the composite. 

 This is the finished edit for combining the two previous photographs from the internet. To do this composite I resized the lens image so that it would the right size to fit in the pupil. I then used the clone tool to copy the lens into the eye. I put the opacity to about 40% so that the original eye came through slightly, and so the lens fitted in with the original. I really like the final edit but I don't think it says enough to be a cyborg, it needs more mechanical features. I could also try adding two eyes to a future composite. I however do like the tonal ranges of this photo, as many researched images from Stelarc from example have this silver tone.