I love playing around with symmetry. When I’m working on a piece, its more than flipping an image around and finding balance. That’s just the starting point. Not every image can balance itself out. Not every image works. So I explore. And I usually find the balance through a happy mistake.
Here's a quick Gif of the process:
Here's the original image:
I tuned some of the colors and adjusted the crop to turn the image into a portrait. At this point, I like the image, but felt I could do more.
I decided to give symmetry a shot, and see if I could find balance in the image. The fire escape really didn't add much to the composition so I decided to lower the image, center it, and crop it.
Pulling out guides helps me study the lines in an image and helps me spot where I could potentially crop, edit, or add things to an image.
I liked where this was going, but there were a few things I needed to adjust. I wanted the person (me) to be the focus of the image and the artifacts in the middle of the image were distracting. Also, it kind of shows your hand. It's a dead giveaway that an image has been flipped around - which isn't necessarily bad, but in this instance, it just gets in the way.
With the artifacts in the middle now gone, I thought the image would be complete, but it lacked a sense of balance. The walls on either side were completely different and I preferred the look of the wall on the right. I decided I was going to clone that wall to the opposite (left) side.
Mirroring the wall would be a little more complex than I anticipated. There were elements behind my back, a car to my right and a door to deal with.
Once the wall had been cloned, I had to carefully mask out the part of my body that was peeking through the flipped image, then re-create the textures on the ground.
At this point my guides are showing me that there is balance, I just need to clean up the textures behind my back and recreate the mirrored door in the background.
And Voila!
