I’ve decided to go down the route of creating a self-portrait based on a 35mm film strip, with a double-exposure of myself filling the frame. During this week’s lecture, we were asked to create a double exposure portrait in the studio with the guidance of the lecturer – This was a perfect learning tool as I had already decided to do this self-portrait before the lecture.
The first step was to create a silhouette in the studio. This was achieved by lighting a white studio background and using black polythene boards to block stray light from entering the frame (known as flagging) as demonstrated in the lighting diagram below:
The resulting image was a profile portrait of myself that had been backlit, meaning that no light was reaching the camera’s sensor from my person – A near perfect silhouette.
The image was then imported into Adobe Photoshop CC where the whites and the blacks were adjusted to their absolutes. I wanted both the blacks and whites to clip, meaning that all information within these areas would be lost. For a double-exposure portrait, this is what we want to happen as we know that no information within the original image will interfere with the image we are going to overlay.
At this point I then resized and cropped the image to 10″ x 8″ and 300ppi, ready for printing later on.
I then created a white solid-colour layer in Photoshop to act as my background.
The next step was to use the quick selection tool to cut out my silhouette from the original image we had imported. Once the silhouette has been fully selected, the ‘Select and Mask’ button then let me refine the edges of the silhouette further to include all strands of hair – Clicking the ‘Smart Radius’ option on ‘Edge Detection’ makes this job much easier.
Once the silhouette has been fully and cleanly cut out, I then overlayed the ‘double exposure’ image. By selecting the blending mode ‘Screen’, the overlayed image will not affect the white background that I had created earlier, only the black of the silhouette. By using the Free Transform tool, I adjusted the size and position of the overlayed image to create the perfect double exposure.
IDI 