Stock Photo Showcase: Melting Pot to Patriotism to Immigration Issues

This versatile image illustrates concepts ranging from social media to immigration issues, to the U. S. as a melting pot.

America As A Melting Pot

An American Flag is juxtaposed over a sea of faces in this stock photo I just created. I like it so much I just had to share it on my blog! If there ever was an image that says the “melting pot” of the United States, this is it! The composite montage of faces includes approximately 250 model-released portraits. While the ethnic diversity says melting pot, the image also can illustrate a wide range of concepts.

Social Media And Networking Photos

This is definitely a social media image and it is showing the “tribe” or “community” that is America. These Americans are linked to each other in a variety of ways and certainly social networking across the Internet is an important part of the linking. Too bad this image wasn’t around when AOL got started…it would have been perfect!

Diversity

As previously mentioned, this is an image about diversity. But it is more than just ethnic diversity, the populace pictured has a wide range of ages and, of course, is fairly well gender balanced (though I actually didn’t count…I am just assuming).

Demographics, Immigration and Politics

This can also be used to indicate demographics both for advertisements and editorial uses.  I can see the image being used by political parties and politicians as well as by any company that wants to indicate the wide acceptance of their products and services across America. Using the American flag with a wide and diverse range of people certainly makes the image a great one for issues around patriotism, immigration and even voter registration!

Creating A Social Media Photo

It took me at least a day’s worth of work just moving the individual portraits around in Photoshop to create the background montage. I then photographed an American Flag in my studio and used Photoshop to lay it over the portrait background. I spent at least another hour trying different things from opacity changes, to mode changes, to mask versions and finally settled on this. At this point I don’t remember exactly what the solution was. I could go back and look at the layered file, but naw, I’m just too lazy to do that now!

Blend Images And A Ton Of Work!

I have uploaded the image to Blend Images, a process that actually took longer than it does for me to create most of my montage images! I spent six hours uploading and editing model releases…arrgh! Blend has a very easy and efficient upload portal, but just doing the repetitive work of finding all the releases (another couple of hours work) scattered over several hard drives, and then uploading them one by one and so forth, was taxing to say the least. But hay, I have a good feeling about this image and I think it will all have been worth it!