In my photos, I looked in particular at stormy or wild cloud formations and at things in which I could see similar pastel colours to the work of Victoria Siemer. I feel the sunset colours, in particular, are evocative of the warm tones in Victoria Siemer's work Peach Mountains. I focused on photographing wide British skies with the landscape in the lower third of the frame, often making use of the Rule of Thirds. I was also inspired by Martin Parr, making sure the scenes I was capturing felt classically British, including the Macro photos I took of drew drops on grass which felt like an epitome of a crisp English morning, as we are, after all, famous for our rain. I also chose specifically to photograph many seagulls, inspired by Martin Parr's West Bay (Seagulls eating chips) and by Victoria Siemer's Mountain Bird. My intention is to select geometric shapes within these landscapes, and featuring these birds and rotate them as Siemer does in her work.

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I have made three edits of the photos from this photoshoot, inspired by Victoria Siemer.

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In my first photo (Bottom Left)  I opened the photo in Adobe Photoshop and decreased the vibrance and saturation of the sky, in response to the soft, unsaturated colours of Siemer's work. I then made a new layer and Bucket Filled it with a pinkish tone, similar to the pink tone of Peach Mountains, set it's blending mode to colour then decreased the layer's opacity unit the photo had a soft tint. I then merged the layers. After this I made a perfectly circular selection and copied and pasted it to a new layer above the photo, which was then flipped vertically using edit > transform > flip verticle to create the Siemer style geometric reflection. I then used the Eraser tool with a big soft brush to soften the bottom edge so that it blended into the sky. I also specifically used the magic wand tool to select the buildings on the photo layer, then deleted the shape of the on the circle layer so that they showed through, like Siemer's lower mountains.

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For my second edit (Bottom Centre), I used Photoshop to increase the vibrance and saturation of the photo, in response to the saturated colours of Martin Parr's work. I then created a Siemer circle using the select tool and flipped it vertically so that it mirrored the tower. I then erased the harsh edges at the bottom of the circle with a soft-edged brush and selected the tower shape on the bottom layer, deleting it from the circle layer so that it showed through. 

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In my third edit (Bottom Right) I looked at the motif of the seagull, using Photoshop to select the bird and the buoy it was stood on and copy and paste them onto a new layer. I then flipped the new layer both horizontally and vertically and moved the bird up to the top left corner in mirror. I then merged the layers, reduced the saturation and added a new opaque layer with a peach tone with it's blending mode set to colour to give it that Siemer-esque colour. To try and create more realism, I used the filters > render > lens flare option to add a streak of lens flare to the sun so that it was peeking out realistically around the new bird and shedding light across them.

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I feel my edits were successful in recreating elements of both Parr and Siemer's work. They achieve the feeling of being fundamentally British landscapes whilst having the ethereal, geometric fragmentation of Siemer's photographs. I feel this reflection style could be used in my work to create a commentary about the differences between home and/or away.