Recreating an image
My choice of photographer for this task is Erik Johansson. His ability to mix reality and fantasy is what drew me to his style of photography and post production.
You will find the image that inspired me here:
http://www.erikjohanssonphoto.com/commissioned-work/2i67w1l2hk28j1p6dfd5kpf9ooiecz
I love pretty much everything about this photo:
- the perspective twists - the surreal feel - the shapes, especially the circles created with the magnifying lenses - the leading lines playing tricks on my eyes - the desaturated and filtered look - the pattern repetitions (the Es, the birds)
I did not attempt to recreate the image fully, I just wanted to play with precarious balance and lines and put some of my imagination and current emotions into the mix.
So I fished out an image from a few months ago
[f 4.5, ISO 100, shutter speed 1/2000s, 50mm lens]
Then holed up in the photo studio at NMIT to get some shots of myself on a black background with a tripod, my camera on a timer and manual focus
[f8.0, ISO 200, shutter speed 1/3s, 18-55mm lens at 18mm]
I used the free transform too to resize myself in proportion to the foggy background, then masked this photo to remove the background (on second thought having a white background would have been miles better in post production). Finally made it black and white to (hopefully) try and conceal some of the masking that didn’t go according to plan. For the same reason (and to add a bit of ghostly feel to myself) I have made my layer slightly transparent.
Here is the final result: Balancing act













