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Experimental Photography

Nicola Kilgallon

Double Exposure1.

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Use this slide to annotate your final image

The background image is of the river and bridge in Stamford Bridge.

This white space is effective as you can see the image outline is just hands.

The hands in a faint opacity of 36 makes them just viewable with the background image being in a similar opacity, creating a discovery experimental photograph.

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My ideas and intentions of making double exposure images was to make some with a clipping mask and white space around them. My main ideas were to have someone’s face with trees in the background as I saw it on the internet and I wanted to try something different with hands and make it more of a discovery photograph by having some form of scenery in the background. The results I got were better than I expected yet there could still be improvements. The bottom of the hands in my final image could have been cropped down better as the edge isn’t very smooth, in comparison to the face in image 3, which was cropped perfectly. My final image is toned down however I would have liked the trees to be more noticeable, like in image 4. My final image contrasts most with image 5. Image 5 is a face with city lights in the background and my final image is hands with a bridge and river in them. They are very different images yet still double exposure and I like them because they are different but I think my final image is more effective and fits the theme discovery more. My influence on this type of double exposure with a clipping mask is Christoffer Relander.

His images are of people with woodland and trees within them and I thought it looked creative when I researched it. Image 4 was the best outcome of the influence of Relander as I decided to have a picture of someone on their side with the trees in the background, similar to the image he created.

http://www.christofferrelander.com/

I think that the aesthetic qualities of my work are good and effective. I think that my final image looks creative and can be perceived in many ways. It can be seen as someone wanting to know where this river leads, someone thinking that they own it and have it to themselves and someone who has the world in their hands. I like that my image has a clipping mask, it gives the hands a lot more awareness in the image as there isn’t too much going on. I think that the strongest element in my final image is the river image as it makes it mysterious, I think that the weakest element is I think that the hands could have had a less opacity to make them more faded so the other image stands out more. I think that my images look good and imaginative, just like the ones I did my research on which have me the ideas. Image 1 and my final image are very similar however image 1 looks very dark compared to the other. I like that it is dark because it looks almost frightening when actually the picture of the tree was taken in day light, I just edited it very dark for a different feel.

The technical qualities of my work are okay but could have been better. I used the magic wand tool to get rid of the image outside of the hand image, yet it managed to make a rough edge at the bottom of the hands without me realising therefore that is the weakest technical part of my image. I think that the best is the opacity of the river a you can see the water flowing inside the hands as it wasn’t very clear at first. I had to put an effect on the river and up the saturation so it was more clear. I also put effects from Photoshop onto my image such as soft light and pin light. The effects completely changed some of the images by making it very dark with red colours or blue, or making it very light, so much that it was nearly all faded. I preferred it when they were more viewable with facial features.

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Overall, my final image is clear yet faint. The colours are limited, but still enough to see what it is and what colour it naturally should be. When I put the contrast up on the colours, the image became too complicated and lost the effect it had before. The hands were too dark and the river wasn’t very viewable and the trees over the river stood out too much. I made the colours faint on purpose so that it didn’t stand out too much but still managed to keep its effectiveness. I like the shape of the image because the clipping mask helps it keep its originality. The patterns of the fingers one after the other help give the image a realistic and 3D look. My images could be developed by trying different images behind the clipping mask, for example I could have a city behind the hands giving a ‘which road to take’ effect which would fit greatly with the theme of discovery. I could swap some images round and see what works best. I could move the same image that is already in the image around to see if a different part of it works better than the one I chose.

The images I produced do fulfill the brief as I have extended my creative and technical skills of photography and I managed to understand how to manipulate photographs. I think my photographs are suitable for Nunnington Hall’s photography exhibition with the theme of discovery. My images do fit the theme of discovery as I did outdoor scenery which when put into my final images it created a mysterious look to my images. The outdoors scenery could lead to anywhere and could be anywhere, the images don’t give away where it is, keeping the images adventurous and making the mind wonder. Image 3 in particular is a discovery image as the river in the image could be anywhere and there could be a meaning to it but the people who view it will decide that reason for themselves. My images are experimental as they are all versions of double exposure images of either two or more images. The settings on the origional settings are all edited and faded, some with colour contrasts and some with blue effects in places. I think this makes my photography experimental, especially as I couldn’t do any of it before this project. The colouring on image 5 has the hue and saturation on very high to make the millennium bridge and the lights on the water very bright for more of an effect against the black and white image. The rest of the image that remains black and white has a slight blur on the inside to keep it from catching the eye rather than the city lights.

I could improve my work by trying to put more than two images into the final image. I could have taken more care when creating the clipping mask to make it more professional. I could take my work further by doing this as I can improve my technical skills and make my images more creative and discovery themed with the help of more images. By doing this, I would be trying to achieve a better and more creative final image. I could undertake further experiments of different ideas like different shaped clipping masks other than a face or hands, I could do things like flowers and bigger objects like cars to make it different.