Puzzled 'Em is a 1930's English Dennis's party game. There are 24 cards, each one showing a different black and white picture, where you write down what you think the image is, and whoever gets the most correct wins. However, there is a twist to the game. Each image that is in the game is a normal household item, but is taken at a weird angle to make it look abstract, and like it isn't the object it is, for example, there is a photo of a biscuit, a razor, a mirror, a funnel, a button, etc. Whoever guesses the most amount of right objects wins.
Some photographers who take images that may puzzle the viewer are:
Hans Bellmer- Hans Bellmer mainly focuses on body parts, and all of his photos are of life sized dolls. They are also taken at lower angles to distort the bodies and make them look more abstract. Here are some of his photographs that show abstraction and some of the formal elements in photography.
Henry Holmes Smith- Henry Holmes Smith focuses on a range of things, such as human bodies and also light, and how different angles effect the way a photo looks. Here are some examples of his photos that show this.
For our assessment, we have to create our own version of Puzzled 'Em, at least 15 abstract photographs and printing them out. I am going to go around the school, focusing on the formal elements, e.g. frame, line, composition, focus, etc, and edit them, by cropping them and cutting out the background, like the original game, and print them out and stick them on card so it is a finished game. I want all of my pictures to be in black and white, so it's a lot harder to guess what each object is, which I can either do with the settings on the camera, or I can edit each one on photoshop. I also will try and experiment with different textures and materials.
My own Puzzled 'Em photos
These are the images I am using for my work. I took them all over around 2-3 photoshoots. I am going to edit them on photoshop, make the photos black and white, and the background plain, and also adjust the images to the they are at an angle so it makes it harder to see what the photo is.
These are my finished and edited photos. I will use all of these for my game. They are all in order of the photos in the gallery above this. This is how I made them: I put the original images into Photoshop and cut out the background. Then, I made the background grey and make the image black and white. If I needed to, I resized the photograph and moved it to another part of the background.
Final game
I am very happy with how my photos turned out, I wanted to have a theme of objects that you see all around you, but angled differently so you can see how different they look when at an angle. I then edited them in Photoshop to make them black and white, and changed the background so you won't be able to tell where you can find them. WWW- I had a good idea of what I wanted to do, stuck with the idea all along, and improved on my photos to make them look even better by editing them. EBI- I wish that I had come up with more ideas, and done more photoshoots of different objects, so that I could choose from one and develop that idea.