PICTURES: The camera never lies? Inverness freelance graphic designer passed her time during coronavirus lockdown by creating a series of fun and quirky photo montages
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An Inverness freelance graphic designer has passed the time during the Covid-19 lockdown by creating a series of fun and quirky photo montages.
Leanne Munro (29), of Telford Road, puts members of her family, friends and even her pets into what she has christened “magic photos” – sometimes shrinking them or turning them into giants in her surreal creations.
Last year she graduated from the University of the Highlands and Islands with a first-class honours degree in visual communication and design after deciding to start studying again in 2016 to broaden her skills in the hope of finding a creative job.
She said: “I’ve been interested in photography since I was little and I started taking it more seriously in my mid-teens, shooting mostly landscape photography. It was a really important hobby to me and a good way to get me out of the house.
“I started learning how to use Photoshop at the end of high school, using photography magazines and website tutorials.
“Initially, this was just to enhance my landscape photographs but I got really excited about other creative ways to use the tools I was learning and I started to explore photo manipulation and creative composites.
“Problem solving is a really fun part of it, figuring out all the elements I need to photograph and combine to make each image.”
She kept some small sketchbooks handy and used them to doodle and write her photo ideas.
She said: “I’ve found photo manipulation to be an amazing creative outlet for me, a way to turn my ideas into finished digital artwork. I enjoy being able to create something new that would be impossible to capture with the camera alone.
“I often like to play around with scale to create strange, surreal compositions. I can get lost in my work for hours as I find it very therapeutic.”
Miss Munro said that during the pandemic she had created a number of images with two of her nephews, who she was caring for while their younger brother was in hospital, and she loved to see their reaction to the results.
She said: “It’s a good distraction for my nephews and it’s given me something positive and productive to focus on.
“My youngest nephew has recently been allowed to come home from hospital for a few hours each day and so hopefully one day soon I can create a magic photo of him too. I’m so grateful that I’ve had a very positive response to my creative images online. The quirky images I’ve shared of Inverness – one of my nephew and the one with my cat at the cathedral – have been particularly popular.”
