Recently, Mr. Delfin’s class experimented with integrating paper silhouettes and cutouts with the surroundings of a photo. To create this effect, students had to adjust the settings of their cameras to best focus on the subject of their photo as well as edit out unnecessary items, such as a stick used to hold the cutout in place, from the final product. 

Maral Istafan

I got the idea for my cutout after seeing similar photographs on social media. One issue I had was the camera focused on both the drawing and the grass background. Another issue I had was that the day I shot the image; it was really windy, and the paper was swaying a lot.

Kevin Nakaishi

For this assignment, I knew I wanted to do something with a water fountain. I began to think of ways that I could use the stream of water, which eventually led me to think of a firefighter. I then found clipart of a firefighter and a fire and traced it. After tracing it, I transferred the image to black cardstock and cut that out to make my cutouts. At first, I glued the skewer stick to the end of the firefighter’s hose; however, this made the cutout very wobbly and hard to photograph. So, I took off the stick and glued it on the cutout so that it wouldn’t move as much. After taking the photo with the help of my friend– holding both cutouts and taking the photo at the same time would have been impossible– I faced the challenge of editing out my friend’s hand. This proved to be quite difficult, as the shadow of her hand changed the background of the photo. In the end, I was able to use a second photo of the water fountain to edit a section of the photo on top of her hand. Although the process was more difficult than I anticipated, I still really enjoyed the final product.

Kelsie Kato

For my cutout, I chose to make a water creature coming out of my pool. I had to pose my cutout in a certain way to make the size of the creature look realistic compared to the pool. The best lighting was achieved by doing many trials of photos over various days and times. The reason for this was that at certain times it was too bright outside creating shadows, which would then make my editing process more difficult. When editing my picture, a difficulty I had was cropping out the sticks that held up my paper pieces so that they couldn’t be seen in the picture. Another difficulty was editing the photo to look like one complete picture because in actuality, my three different cutout pieces meant I needed to take three separate images. 

Alice Young

It was difficult to hold the cutout and simultaneously try to take a clear photo. It took me a couple of tries to get a picture that was posed properly and also in focus. When posing the cutout, I wanted it to line up with the power lines so that it really looked like a person ziplining. 

Brandon Chang

For my picture, I decided to have a cutout of a person running on the track. I wanted to keep my cutout simple and to the point. The lighting could be different because it depends on when the athlete decides to practice during the day. A difficulty I had editing was to edit out the stick connected to the cutout. I am still proud of my cutout though, and hopefully I can improve even more in the future.

Peter Zheng

For this photography cutout assignment, I actually spent quite a bit of time thinking about what kind of poses I wanted my cutout characters to be in. Surprisingly, I was trying to pull out a plug myself when it wouldn’t budge. That’s when I had the thought to make one of my photos a man pulling a wire out of a plug. At first, it was a bit difficult to find an area to frame the shot, as some of the outlets were either behind a table or too cramped to be a backdrop for my character. After a while of searching, I found the perfect place to take my photo, and I placed the cutout over the wire and took the shot. During my editing phase, I noticed that the photo was quite dark and yellow since the light coming from the ceiling was a small, dim, yellow light. I took my time and adjusted the lighting and color of the photo, then I used the brush tool to paint out any imperfections. That left me with the finished product, Man Pulling Plug.

Johan Thomas

The main inspiration for this photo was that it was late in the night, and I knew I wanted my picture to be related to the moon and stars somehow. While I was searching for cutouts to use, I came across the fairy, and since I already knew I wanted the sky and stars to be the background, I just put the two together and took the photo. The editing process was fairly simple; all I did was blur the background around the fairy to make it look like it was the main subject. Although this picture seemed basic, one difficulty I came across while editing was that the fairy was very rough around the edges. I tried to smooth the corners, but when I zoomed in and erased around the cutout, it only made the corners pointier. Overall, I was very satisfied with how my picture turned out, and I would love to do an assignment like this again.

Breanna Jimenez