Although intuitively I was aware of the concept, there are two very interesting words that apply to creative photographic work. The first of the words is 'of'', as in, a photograph of an apple. A superb and eye catching photo of a red apple, but nevertheless a rather boring and probably forgettable picture of said red apple. Now let us imagine the rosy red apple is caught by the camera at the very instant that a beautiful butterfly alights. Clearly, there is a story here 'about' the instance and the photographer's luck/skill in capturing such a fleeting, never to be repeated image.Where did the butterfly come from? Where is it going?. Did it want to eat some of the apple? etc, etc, so many questions to be asked of this simple scenario. As a result of this simple proposition, I shall in future try harder to have a story to tell about my creative output.
The days and weeks of this Covid lock down grind on. Luckily I am almost always very busy with a list of household tasks to be completed---would Mrs. W. want it any other way?
Yesterday I embarked on a selfie project. With a shortage of live models in my life, I often have to hire yours sincerely to pose. Now I do charge a hefty fee to pose for myself, so in view of this cost I decided to go the value route and incorporate four of me in the photo---not so difficult to achieve thanks to Photoshop Elements. My tripod was carefully set up to ensure that the camera was stable & untouched for each of the poses with the 10 second timer switched on so that I had time to hustle myself into position for each specific pose. To make the photo a little more interesting, I decided raid the wardrobe & to wear a different outfit for each pose. As with most things Photoshop, there are always multiple ways to achieve the same end effect. I opted to stack the images on top of each other, employing the rubber eraser tool, exposing the image (in this case, our trusty model) from the layer below. This layer on layer approach was repeated with erasure to expose the lower relevant layer details. Ultimately, I had each of the four models showing through to provide the effect of appearing that the different me's were all in the room concurrently. The entire project took me several hours to complete, but in an otherwise unhurried lock down day, I had lots of fun at zero cost to the household budget.
READERS: To make most sense of the continuity of this blog, it is suggested that you commence reading entries with the earliest posting date.
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Yesterday I embarked on a selfie project. With a shortage of live models in my life, I often have to hire yours sincerely to pose. Now I do charge a hefty fee to pose for myself, so in view of this cost I decided to go the value route and incorporate four of me in the photo---not so difficult to achieve thanks to Photoshop Elements. My tripod was carefully set up to ensure that the camera was stable & untouched for each of the poses with the 10 second timer switched on so that I had time to hustle myself into position for each specific pose. To make the photo a little more interesting, I decided raid the wardrobe & to wear a different outfit for each pose. As with most things Photoshop, there are always multiple ways to achieve the same end effect. I opted to stack the images on top of each other, employing the rubber eraser tool, exposing the image (in this case, our trusty model) from the layer below. This layer on layer approach was repeated with erasure to expose the lower relevant layer details. Ultimately, I had each of the four models showing through to provide the effect of appearing that the different me's were all in the room concurrently. The entire project took me several hours to complete, but in an otherwise unhurried lock down day, I had lots of fun at zero cost to the household budget.
READERS: To make most sense of the continuity of this blog, it is suggested that you commence reading entries with the earliest posting date.
.
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