LIGHT PROJECT- EVALUATION

For my final piece I decided to do 'on camera' double exposures. I came to this conclusion after looking at some pictures on pinterest . My main inspiration came from Christoffer Relander's beautiful double exposures which are also said to be done 'on

Camera. I began experimenting using previous film portraits and putting these on to a negative carrier along with another film of something like trees, or something a pattern just to get a feel of how it would look. It worked really well, after numerous attempts I found that working with an image with a white background works really well as all the white from the pattern will not show in the background but will show up on the darker areas which are the face, clothes and hair etc.

After doing this I decided that I would like to do my final piece on film rather than on a digital camera as it would be somewhat easier to achieve the double exposure look on camera. To do this I had to photograph pictures in the woods of trees, branches and twigs anything with pattern. I under exposed these images in order for the second set of photographs to show through. I then rewound the film on a changing bag and put it back into the camera. Once this was done I took my second set of images which were portraits of my sister. I used a moveable lamp for lighting and placed her against a plain white background as I didn't want something dark, as then nothing would show and nothing too busy.

After developing my photographs, I was quite pleased with them but then to develop them even further. I decided to do a 'masking technique'. I created a simple geometric pattern on Adobe Illustrator, printed it off and stuck onto a piece of black card. After cutting it out I placed it onto of the photographic paper and exposed the image for the right amount of time. When doing this I found that on the larger paper the time previously done on smaller paper wasn't long enough and needed to be left longer in order for it to be dark enough for the pattern to show. This became a bit of problem as paper had already been wasted when it was a little too late. I also found lining the pattern with the image quite difficult,and many a time the paper would move causing it to look wonky. 

All things considered I am quite happy with my final outcomes for the simple fact that I did it on a whim, not knowing if anything would come out or not. To be honest I didn't have high hopes for it as not being able to see the image after it has been taken makes the task that even more difficult. But I was pleased that I had some images which worked really well and that it almost looks like the double exposure is part of the portrait image.

In order to improve, I think I could have taken a little more care into recording done the settings and at which settings did the images come out best. This would be very time consuming but would be worth it in order to have an amazing set of double exposures.

In conclusion, I thought the project was quite challenging, and although it was quite free in the way you approached it, I at times prefer to have some structure and guidance for what I have to do.