Digital Imaging: Bannack Creative Photography

Levitation, ghosting, abstract, commercial, and conceptual photography are all forms of creative photography. They also require quite a bit of forethought and planning.

Levitation

Dorothy’s Kitchen – Bannack Ghost Town, Montana  – February 24, 2017)

To capture this image I set my camera up on a tripod and took 3 separate images which you can later mask together in Photoshop. It is important to have your camera set for a high aperture so all the layers are in focus. Your camera should also be set to stay at the same settings for each shot. For the first of the images used to create this image I took a picture of the woman stirring a pot. One person held her skirt up and others helped pick up piece of her hair. It is important that they hold the objects so you can later mask them out without having to edit the objects too much. The second was of them holding the different objects up in the air. And the third was of just the kitchen without the people in it.

In post I started with the plain kitchen image and pasted the image with her at the stove over top of it. I then used a masking layer to remove the background behind her so that you could see the image underneath. I ended up using a low opacity brush to also make the bottom of her skirt and the ends of her hair more translucent. I then did the same with the image of the floating objects. I didn’t like the placement of some of the objects so I copied the layer and moved each object individually, masking out the other images on the layer.

Ghost

Ghosting is caused by leaving the shutter speed open for longer while having the subject move in the frame. I left the shutter open for about 3 seconds on this image. I did the basic edits but then used the distort function of the transform tool to straightened the window a frame a little more.

 

Abstract

This image was captured by shooting through one window, across the room and out of another window with the curtains partly drawn.

Commercial

Apple: The Original Healthy Snack – why buy expensive “healthy” snacks for your kids when you can visit your local farmer’s market.

 

Conceptual

Lonely Schoolmarm – school teachers back then were not allowed to be married and often after all the children would leave for the day they would not have a family to go home to. Many had traveled out West from the East and were far from their families. I imaging that sometimes it had to be a lonely career and they would sometimes get homesick.