I got the idea for these photographs from a Dutch campaign entitled "Women with Guts" the message of which is quite clear as they have taken an outline of each subject eg. office worker, pregnant girl and demonstrater. These photos are not just portraits but silhouettes of each one which have been filled in with photographs of their daily life giving connotations and suggestions about how they regard their lives and relevance to 21st Century woman.

Here are some of my works within photoshop creating layers and using manipulation to create a very dramatic image. Step One - to select the middle white tones using a magic eraser and set two 20. Step Two - to remove the inner section so only the dark areas of the nose, mouth and shadows remain as shown in the previous photo. Step Three - to create a layer behind the first layer of the car on the road so when loaded up, the second layer can be seen through the top layer as shown in this photo.

post production in Photoshop

Images taken on raw format have been put through post production in Photoshopthus changing the colour balance, lens correction and inverting the colours to create a surrealist image. As well as this, I have played around with artistic filter in twist/twirl format - either highlighting the entire image or parts of the image to create completely different photographs from those which I took originallyFor these two images,I tried to photograph architecture and invert it and put a twist spiral effect as this would be extremely unusual for the architecture here is quite mundane. For example, a photograph of the cooling towers at the NHS hospital - Leeds General Infirmary. The other photograph of the lighthouse on Whitby harbour is my second example.

This idea helped me to go on to produce further work of this style in portrait and sport photography. This gave significant meanings to my portrait photographs.For example, I have used a crop shot and selected one half of the screen to put the twist effect which rotates the clouds and twists the background. This gives connotations of thoughts which are going through the subject's mind and the idea that perception is reality.

In this advertisement image by Olympus we can see how image manipulation has been very dramatic in this particular photograph. By putting a very watery and twisted effect together this has created a truly surrealistic view of the world which I also tried to replicate in my own photograph on the right using similar techniques.