Experiments in Photomontage

I’ve recently become quite interested in the intersection of photomontage – cutting and joining and number of different photographs together – and magical realism, which is a kind of intense meditation on reality to the point of hyperreality, possibly with the inclusion of elements of the fantastic.

Last June, newly equipped with my Canon 60D, I decided to do a little experiment in photoshopping a scene together in my home office at the time.

Hand in Couch

I just used what was immediately around me.  I took several shots of my arm on the couch and of just the couch itself, and some photoshopping later we get this image which looks real but we yet know cannot be real.  I think this juxtaposition is kind of creepy and unsettling.

Just recently I’ve read a lot of strobist.com – that site is awesome.  Armed with my brother’s Canon Speedlite 430 EX as well as a light stand + umbrella I’ve been wreaking some studio quality lighting havoc recently.  Catching up on the work of Dave Hill I got to thinking about how to get multi-light pictures having only one light source (my flash) and possibly outside ambient light.  I thought why not independently light areas of the scene and then stitch them together in PS.  Basically light painting with a flash and shoot-through umbrella.

So I took roughly 60-70 pictures and ultimately ended up taking 32 of them and putting them together in PS.

Lee X 3

All in all this picture was 61 layers (of which 32 were photos) totaling 3GB!  Consequently found out about the .psb file extension through this project, which is Adobe’s large file format as .psd’s only go up to 2 gigs.

Anyway, most of the work was actually in the brackground.  I basically used the light parts of each component picture and used the Lighten blend mode to blend the pics on top of one another.  Getting it just right requires a fair amount fine-tuning, but that was the basic process.  I used the analogy of additive lighting whereby I started with a black background and added light selectively to build up the picture.

The end result is quite interesting. The room is very unrealistically lit and there isn’t an obvious light source.  So just the room in and of itself is “off” somehow but it shows much greater detail – hyperreal so to speak.  Then of course three versions of me cannot be, yet it looks real… though in a fake way.  Some of the shadows could be improved and are to me giveaways (e.g. the right arm of me sitting in the recliner, or the right hand of me on the ground), but you don’t immediately notice it.

To me a quite fascinating space, the edge between reality and imagination.  Though all photography is an illusion (an image on paper or screen ain’t the real thing), there’s an expectation that a photo depicts some kind of reality objectively.  Of course there’s a huge amount of editing (cropping, lighting, etc.) but I guess the expectation is that I could go out and see a depicted scene for myself.  Playing with this expectation through photomontage opens up endless possibilities to surprise and challenge the viewer.