PRODUCE A CREATIVE COMPOSITE
There are no limits to what you can create
How do you take photographs with impact? Or should we ask, how do you ‘make’ photographs with impact? Today, you don’t have to rely on something happening in front of your lens – you can create something from your imagination.
There appear to be two schools of thought in popular photography today. On the one hand, some photographers believe that photographs should be based in reality – they should be factual and representative of something that really happened or existed. This is a traditional viewpoint, perhaps reflecting what people understand to be the history and purpose of photography.
On the other hand, a second view is that photography can also be an art form. Just as we use language for poetry as well as scientific papers, we can also use photography in our creative pursuit for producing images with impact.
However, just because something is new and different, that doesn’t make it good. A badly produced composite image is just that, badly produced and of little value. In this way, the process of creating a photograph with impact can be far more challenging than searching or waiting for something to happen in real life. Suddenly we’re starting with a blank canvas, and more questions arise – like, where do our ideas come from?
Creative photography doesn’t have to be composite photography – the process of combining two or more different images into one – but it often is. Composites can allow us to explore more complicated ideas, or to achieve our results more simply. For instance, in the accompanying photograph of the man floating above the ground, a mechanical lift and harness could have suspended the subject, but it was much easier to use composite images to create the intended ‘impact’ – the impression of someone floating.
There are many ways you can create composite images. Some photography artists don’t try to make their composites believable, preferring to produce a ‘cartoon’ or ‘painterly’ result. Other photographers pride themselves in creating images that look real, challenging us to figure out how they were done. The choice is yours, but both approaches require time and precise Photoshop work.
“Composites allow us to explore more complicated ideas”