Pixiq

Preface

This is the start of a series about the making of several photographs.  The idea comes from the master - The Making of 40 Photographs - by Ansel Adams.  How he ever found time to write and produce as many books as he did, not to mention inventing the Zone System which is still used - I don't know.

My plan is to take images that people have been interested in show HOW THEY WERE MADE.

Yesterday I thought I'd take the simplest color infrared image I could find and explain how it went from a RAW file in the modified infrared camera to the final color image and before I knew it - I had about 20 screenshots, and two pages of writing.  

And that was a simple example.  So this morning I found something that is not only simpler, but I'll bet that very few people can guess how it was done -- and that is this image of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The image began as a 4 x 5 inch black and white film negative.  The view camera was useful in this situation because it had tilts and swivels and without going into that since that's not what the post is about - I was able to have the back of the camera parallel to the side of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Enough of a preface.  HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED.

Believe it or not - this image was created with Photomatix (HDR) without doing any manipulation to the final image.  And guess what, you can do it with other HDR programs.  

I'm using Lightroom to organize and launch other programs.  But the idea is this.  Take the original file and make a clone of it.  A dupe.  Whatever you want to call it.  

Flip that second file horizontally.  For this particular shot, flipping it horizontally seemed to be the way to go as I wanted to see how the crossing of the cables would work.  And it is not always easy to imagine what you are going to get with this method.

Warning - be very careful using this technique with people's faces - you may get freaked out.

So now you have your two files that you are going to merge with your HDR program - however - in Photomatix DO NOT TELL THE PROGRAM TO ALIGN THE IMAGES.

What?  That's right.  Do not align the images.  And whether you decide to convert to HDR or to FUSE - that's your artistic choice.  But basically what you have here is an easy way to take two images that have nothing to do with each other (well in this case one is a mirror image) but the technique will produce very interesting results with images that really don't have anything to do with each other.

I'll post an image in the next post where I've combined three files that have nothing to do with each other with Photomatix.

Now it is true - that after I created what I call the first Palindrome version, I couldn't help myself and worked on it a bit in NIK software adjusting the contrast and dodging and burning but really nothing that Ansel wouldn't have done had he begun with this sort of thing.

It is similar to a double exposure with film - but it just isn't the same because the results are going to be very different depending on which HDR program or Fusing program you use to do the combining.

One of the things that I've loved about photography - and that has kept me hooked all these years - is exactly this sort of thing.  The dada movement made double exposures, and some that were a bit off in different ways - and found new ways to achieve surreal results.

I got into HDR to find out what it was all about, and for the most part I use it as part of a process and most of my HDR images don't advertise themselves as such.  But here's an example where just unchecking this one box: ALIGN IMAGES can be used to create unexpected results.

p.s.  Same technique applied to an exterior shot of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.