Next time the kids mutiny at the prospect of posing for yet another portrait, ask them to produce a tableaux instead. Hang a blanket for a backdrop and let them raid the attic for props and costumes. Then take the picture.
After that initiation, try mirrors, colored lights or reflective materials to make other inventive portraits. Adopt the same techniques to conjure up kaleidoscopic interior shots that you’d never see in “House Beautiful.”
Then discover going out at night and creating neon landscapes by “painting with light”-a penlight, to be precise.
The pros who create the fantasy effects you see in magazines and museums suggest setting your imagination on override as a starting step for this kind of photography. The most sophisticated SLR can’t compete with the shutter that clicks off in the mind’s eye.
This article-and a sequel running next Friday-features tips for amateurs from several prominent photographers who create fantasy artworks, plus a variety of other techniques to try. Here, we offer fantasy effects that can be created in the camera or directly on the print. Next week, we’ll look at special effects that can be achieved in the darkroom along with some unconventional prints that can be made without a darkroom.
Filters, gels, specialty lenses and flash can lend themselves to great fantasy effects. But all that’s really essential in terms of equipment are a tripod, an electronic camera with override options or an old camera with manual shutter speeds and f-stops. Some fantasy art, such as tableaux, can be photographed with any point-and-shoot camera.
That’s not to say that the pros always do it so simply. It took miles of cable, two all-night vigils and a 20-member crew for Barbara Kasten to light and photograph an ancient Roman quarry in Spain. A mythical past and a mysterious present collide in the theatrical mists of cobalt blue and gold that Kasten casts on the rock by using gels on her lights.
Kasten took five separate shots of the quarry, spaces disconnected in physical geography but woven together through computer imaging into a 42-foot backlit mural. The mural curves to create a three-dimensional panorama. Kasten is completing an outdoor installation of the panorama that will stand permanently at the Port of Tarragona in Spain.
“It’s like seeing reality and changing it into another reality through my vision. I like to loosen people’s imaginations and let them wander through the space. Who knows what reality is?” says Kasten.
Her signature lighting in photographs of the cliff dwellings of the American Southwest and of architectural sites such as the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, featured on the Friday section cover this week. The effect creates cosmic landscapes where conventional buildings usually stand.
Kasten recommends mirrors to turn the simplest environment into a fantasy. “You totally dislocate the place where you are and reflect spaces outside of the range of the camera,” she says. Colored light bulbs also can offer the amateur a creative light source for dramatic effects.
Kasten suggests experimenting with textures for such shots as well. “The color looks different on matte surfaces as compared to shiny surfaces,” she says. “Try mylar or cellophane-materials that catch the light, though you can still see through it. Use things that are commonplace-but extraordinary.”
Rich Scarpitta prowls the night in dark clothing with a camera and a flashlight. No, he is not a private investigator. He is a very special painter whose canvas is a piece of film. He uses a penlight, a flashlight, sparklers or road flares during lengthy time exposures to paint in the outlines of classic American cars, playground equipment or, most recently, a tugboat. The effect suggests objects that have been reincarnated as neon sculptures.
The shutter of the camera stays open during the entire time Scarpitta works with his handheld light sources. He often stands to the side of each section of a piece he is outlining because the light must always be visible to the camera to generate a continuous line. He himself remains the invisible phantom in his own photographs, never in one place long enough for the film to burn in his image. His black clothing and his use of very slow color film (ISO 64) shot at high f-stops simply cancel him out of the picture.
He did make an appearance as he painted in the tugboat during a four-hour exposure. “I outlined myself like a ghost captain on the boat. I had a stepladder and an extension ladder and I had to paint the stepladder black so it would take longer to reflect light and wouldn’t show,” he says.
Next he’d like to “paint” Yankee Stadium.
“When people see my work, they think I did it with a computer. I’m man against computer. I may outline one and then let’s see the computer outline me,” he says.
An amateur who wants to try the painting with light technique may need anywhere from 45 minutes to more than an hour to outline an object such as a car. Compose the shot in advance, deciding how much of the frame will be filled with the object to be outlined. Choose a penlight or flashlight, depending on how thick an outline is desired. The details of the object and distance from the camera are factors to consider here. Use a locking cable release to open the shutter so it will remain open for the entire duration of the shot.
Scarpitta says to practice first to figure out the progression of an outline. “The key to it is being methodical. If you do the left headlight, next do the right headlight. When I did the tugboat, I did the top deck, then the second deck; I did all the windows as a group, all the doors as a group, all the railings as a group,” he says.
Painting with light can be done without any source subject, of course. Just stand in front of the open aperture of a camera in the dark and draw an abstract design, sketch a cartoon figure or write your name with the penlight.
These sketches can be done indoors and can take as little as 10 seconds. Pre-focus the camera for the distance you will stand from it. Check through the viewfinder for the size of the area visible at this distance. This is your “canvas.” Fill this area with slow, sweeping gestures with a penlight.
Sandy Skoglund has unleashed a den of red foxes through a bistro, dozens of chartreuse cats through a grim gray tenement and an army of black squirrels across a pink suburban back yard. (Everything is pink-patio, furnishings, trees and bushes too.) After the months of setup, Skoglund finally photographs her tableaux, and the prints are in such hot demand that she makes her living doing this.
Skoglund sculpted, cast and painted all the animals for her previous tableaux and built the sets in her studio, a six-month production in some cases. The people in the scenes are real enough but so oblivious to their surroundings that they appear to be mannequins. They are in fact mannequins in her latest tableaux, “The Cocktail Party,” where the acid rain of gossip apparently has been washed away in a deluge of cheesy snacks that cover everything.
It might all be quite depressing except that Skoglund’s non-stop humor and eye for detail leave the viewer laughing and ready to take on her next bizarre spoof of contemporary life.
Skoglund’s early tableaux created completely fanciful scenes with objects as mundane as coat hangers. “Using found objects is an easy way to get started,” she says. She suggests taking very clear, sharp pictures on slower film to heighten the contrast between the technical realism of the photograph and the utter fantasy of the contents.
Cutouts of other photographs or pictures in magazine offer the opportunity to collage and layer a tableaux with images of flying horses, planets or ancient ruins-props that are not available in the average home. Ruth Thorne-Thomsen’s simple cutouts set up in the sands on the beach suggest rediscovered lost worlds, for instance.
Lots of fantasy techniques such as double exposures and ghost images build on conventional photographs taken in unconventional ways. There’s lots of trial and error involved here. It helps to record the exposure settings for each shot to know which direction to head for improved results next time. But be open to mistakes: They can trigger a whole new approach to a technique.
Double or multiple exposures result from taking two or more pictures on the same frame of film. Many cameras guard against double exposures by making it impossible to click the shutter after a frame of film is exposed until the film is advanced. Even so, if the shutter is locked up for a time exposure, you can manually close off the lens with a lens cap to allow time to move from the first scene to the second scene of a double exposure. Some old cameras don’t have the film advance safety feature, however, so this is a good time to pull out that heirloom camera on the top shelf of the hall closet.
If you make a multiple exposure of the moon, shooting at half-hour intervals as it rises in the sky, the final picture will show several moons. You can juxtapose two faces or juxtapose a face in a landscape or a hand and a flower. Consider the relative size of each image when shooting. Two faces that overlap like masks must be the same size with each subject facing the same direction. Exposure times can be tricky here. In general, it’s necessary to underexpose the individual shots so the final cumulative image won’t be overexposed.
Ghost images can result anytime a person moves while a picture is being taken. This is one mistake lots of artists have turned to their advantage to create a spirit world in their photographs. Obviously, exposure times must allow for a subject to walk across the scene so that their presence becomes a transparent sequence of images. The slower someone walks, the more solid and detailed the image will appear. Experiment with exposure times and differing levels of ambient light to achieve the trade-off between transparency and detail.
Another way to achieve ghost images is with a moving camera rather than a moving subject. Panning slowly across a scene with a camera will achieve a blurred effect that can give still objects an aura of movement.
Black-and-white infrared film creates ethereal, otherworldly scenes because of its sensitivity to infrared radiation. Skin, stone, trees and other surfaces absorb or reflect infrared radiation from ordinary sunlight. Scenes in partial sun and partial shade become surreal spaces of glowing whites and velvet blacks in prints made from infrared negatives.
Hand-coloring is as old as photography itself. Early photographers hand colored their daguerreotypes.
