Nellie Lowe Unit 4 : Shoot 1

I was inspired by Brewster to create a couple of images using her techniques. I did a shoot using my friend Shan. That day I had asked her to wear a dress, as I felt like the shoot images would turn out better if she was wearing something a little more flowy than a pair of trousers and a t-shirt. The colour of the dress didn't matter, but I thought that if she wore a darker dress rather than a summery pale one, it would show through the image a little better when it came to introducing the double exposure.
Instead of sculpting my work from a map, I decided it would be best for me to replace the dress with different images such as that of a birds eye view of a city to one of a beautiful forest. I chose these examples because I wanted some diversity in my dresses. Rather than using a map like Brewster, I used the birds eye view of a city as I didn't want to copy her idea too much. I chose the picture of a forest as it is the opposite of a city, I liked having one rural dress and one urban dress, per say. I used images I found on the Internet as I didn't have any shots like those taken by me, and more than anything this was just a little experimental shoot to get things going underway.

What I liked about the outcome of my images was how flexible I could be with them, I could choose any background I wanted and every image could tell a slightly different story. I experimented with four different backgrounds rather than loads more, I didn't want to spend too long on this shoot as I still had plenty of research to be getting on with. The images themselves are very simple as they're just a girl in a dress, and the editing process was so easy I didn't feel as though I needed a ton of practice with it.

I used these two images for my first shoot. These were shot in JPEG using a 50mm Nikkor f1.8 lens at an aperture opening of f/8, ISO 400 and a shutter speed of 1/100.

As this was only an experimental shoot I wasn't going to spend too long cropping and retouching the photos to make them look like they should belong on the front cover of Vogue. I opened the images up in Photoshop and then began the editing process.

What I learned whilst editing these photos was that I really enjoyed fiddling about with different opacities and seeing how it alters the image in a subtle yet effective way. I didn't want the dress to be more visible than the chosen backgrounds, because I knew that it would take the focus away from the city scape or the forest. Then again I didn't want the dress to be completely invisible seeing as it would make the image look really fake and photoshopped, rather than more realistic. In the end I went with an opacity of 42% on the layer titled 'Pasted Dress'. I had cropped out the dress beforehand and pasted it onto a transparent layer, sandwiching the photo of the forest/city in between the original background layer and the dress layer. Since I lowered the opacity of the dress, the rest of the image had an opacity of 100% whereas the dress only had 42%. I chose 42% because it was the opacity which I felt made the image look best - you could still slightly see the shadows and the patterns of the dress, but the forest/city is far more prominent.

Here are a couple of examples I printscreened whilst editing:

Original

0% Opacity

30% Opacity

38% Opacity

50% Opacity

80% Opacity

Here is just an extra little experiment I did using a different background:

Original

Beach background - opacity set to 28%

Although I generally quite like these images, there are still a couple of things I would improve on. For instance I find my cropping to be a little sketchy - I believe that in order for me to gain better results I need to put more care and patience when it comes to selecting around the part of the image I want to select - otherwise it just looks rushed and amateurish.

Something I also want to learn to do is to shape the image, so it looks more realistic by moulding to the selection rather than just replacing it. Thanks to this shoot I have learned and gained skill in how to do effective double exposure using a digital image manipulation program.

Here is the contact sheet of my shoot and the two images I used as backgrounds: