Select photos you own or whose use rights you have purchased to avoid copyright infringement.
Combining photos is a common class assignment (or self-assigned challenge) when learning to use an advanced photo editing software program. While the actual photo combining may challenge and, at times, frustrate you, the project overall can be an enjoyable creative exercise if you select photos you find aesthetically appealing and combine them in a way that you feel will surprise, delight, unnerve or inspire the viewer.
Urban Wildlife
Transport a lazing lion to a crowded city street.
Combine a photo of an urban landscape, such as Millennium Park in Chicago, with a photo of a wild animal, like a tiger or herd of zebras, to make an image that reminds viewers just how much urban environments have been altered from their natural state. For example, you could place zebras from the wildlife photo onto a grassy urban-park lawn or drop a Bengal tiger into a shadowy back alley.
Cave Dwellers
Use a photo of a cave interior that is well-lit.
Combine a photo of people wearing business suits, carrying briefcases and hurrying along a sidewalk with a photo taken deep within the interior of a cave to create an image that comments on the evolution of humankind. Transpose the people into the cave, as if they are rushing to get to a meeting within it. Use a cave photo that includes cave paintings of buffalo herds on the walls. The hurrying business people will visually echo the painted herds.
Mirror Image
A mirror-image shot can be thoughtful or downright eerie.
Combine an image of a person looking in the mirror with an image of the same person or setting altered in some way to form an unsettling, thought-provoking or absurd image. For example, you could start with a photo of a conservatively dressed woman looking in the mirror with a somber expression. Replace the mirror part of the photo with another photo of that same woman in the same room, wearing a clown suit. Alternately, the reflection could be spooky (the woman with a ghostly figure behind her) or somber (the woman crying).
Surreal Landscape
Using a desert landscape photo will create a Daliesque feel in the combined photo.
Combine an image of an ordinary object or landscape, such as a crowded freeway, a writing desk, a gas station or a school building, with an exotic or incongruous location to form a surreal image. For example, show a writing desk sitting alone in a high-resolution image of the surface of Mars, a neon-lit gas station joining overgrown Inca ruins in the Cordillera Vilcabamba of Peru, or a rush-hour freeway nestled between the narrow walls of a Utah slot canyon.
Tags: with photo, Combine image, Combine photo, example could, image example
