On going evaluations

1

Experimental Photography

Katie Scruton

Multiple Exposure

Multiple Exposure

7

I feel like I realised my ideas and intentions pretty quickly and well. Even when I realised that my original idea wasn’t particularly going to work out, I quickly thought of some other ideas that I could use that linked to my original planning ideas of Discovery and Finding Something New, whether it be a feeling or band etc. Despite this, I have managed to produce many different Multiple Exposure images and all of them have impressed me and improved my skills with Photoshop by using online tutorials. However, to create some of the images that I did, I tweaked the tutorials a little bit by changing a section of it of only doing the first few steps. For my final photographs, I was influenced by my pre existing images of concerts I had been to and the fact that I had discovered these bands and their music and enjoyed them enough to spend more money by buying their albums and/or seeing them live, potentially creating new feelings, whether it was toward the band, such as obsession, or if it was a new feeling of happiness or disappointment etc. The images I created are a more exciting take on what already existed and some of them look like echoes from the past. Compared to other Multiple Exposure images I looked at, mine are very unique and have more filtered effects to them and not just the usual black and white scene shaped into the outline of somebody’s head. I am glad that my original idea didn’t work out because I feel like I produced some work that was even better.

All of the images that I used my own photographs to produce have a ghostly and different. It seems almost as if there is a time lapse happening and they’re being captured in the image. It also has the effect of a long shutter speed, capturing longer than just 1/100 of a second etc. The strongest part of my work is that it all came together and the images worked when put together. I could also experiment further by putting different images together and using different effects so I could create a lot more images than my original idea would let me. However, my weakest part was the fact I was limited to Multiple Exposure as a technique and I couldn’t expand into Hockney montages like I claimed I would in my planning because they were pre existing images that I worked from. I tried to crop the image to create the original image in smaller parts and then create them into a montage but it didn’t work for me. My original idea would have allowed me to use different techniques alongside Multiple Exposures.

There was quite a lot of technical aspects to create the final versions of my images. I learned some of these skills through a tutorial online about Multiple Exposure. On some of the images I did my own method by layering 2 or more images and then lowering the opacity between 32% and 64% to get the Multiple Exposure effect. The tutorial taught me a different way to create a similar effect whilst adding a filter at the same time. From there I went to adjust that method to fit what I wanted for the image I was working on. There was nothing very technical about taking the original image, just the focusing because they were taken on my iPhone 4. The post production of my images were the most technical aspects of the process and also the strongest. I learned the method off by heart so that I could quickly produce other images with the same style but maybe change the filter between Darken, Overlay, Multiply and Lighten.

8

I could have maybe improved my work by being more prepared for certain ideas to not work like I wanted them to so I could move straight onto my next idea instead of wasting time trying to think of what to do and whether to do a different technique altogether. Also I could probably do more techniques if I had a contingency plan as I wouldn’t be using old gig images that had no real plan behind them apart from catching memories. Despite this, I feel like they created some overall pieces that I am more than happy with. Maybe if I went a gig with intentions to create experimental photography pieces I would have probably focussed more on getting good images and different styles etc. This way I could create many more images and styles instead of being limited in what I do. Despite all this, I am happy with the work that I produced and it turned out better than my original idea.

In all of my own images. There are a lot of straight lines from the lights and the stage sets. There are also lots of different colours, also from the lights, especially the distant, layered images. Mixing them all together makes for something colourful and interesting. On some of the images, they are colour mixed with greyscale so it becomes half and half. In all of my images, there is a contrast of colour and a contrast of elements from the different images mixed together. All these elements of my work could be developed to create more interesting images especially using the lights and such.

The brief I was set was to produce 3 images using experimental techniques we had learned about all based along the theme of Discovery. All of my own images showed scenes from concerts that I had been to. This fitted the theme as all the concerts made me discover new bands, feelings and more. The technique I have used is called Multiple Exposure. I chose to use this style because some of the examples that I saw online looked really good and inspired some of my ideas. They are experimental as they were created by testing out different tutorials and general messing around and experimenting on Photoshop. The image that is rotated with half of it in green and half in black and white was created from following the first few steps on a tutorial and then changing one of the layers to black and white. Another example is one of my final images, adding three separate images of distant stage shots and merging them together. The final product ended up looking like there was more people there than there would be (but with good effect) and it added more lights, colours and contrasts.