78147 Orton Image: Temperate Rainforest
Having gone back in the archive for some of my early digital images, this morning I decided to pull out a few film shots from even earlier years. Back in the 1980s, Michael Orton of Nanaimo, British Columbia, developed a technique for creating surreal, glowing images using slide film. It became widely known as Orton Imagery.
A quick explanation: you would make two shots of the same scene, (1) out of focus, wide aperture, one stop overexposed; and (2) in focus, your choice of aperture, 2 stops overexposed. Then sandwich the developed slide frames into the same mount and shoot a dupe (or have a lab do that); in later years you could create a scan. This is a scan of a dupe.
These days a similar effect can be obtained in Photoshop. Michael continues to push creative boundaries - from what I can see, he never was interested in making conventional photos.
I didn't come close to achieving the quality of his work, which you can find online via Google search. But I had fun with it. This shot ran as a 2-page spread in a feature article I wrote for Explore magazine in 2000.
Photographed at French Beach Provincial Park, Vancouver Island, BC (Canada). Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission ©1998 James R. Page - all rights reserved.
78147 Orton Image: Temperate Rainforest
Having gone back in the archive for some of my early digital images, this morning I decided to pull out a few film shots from even earlier years. Back in the 1980s, Michael Orton of Nanaimo, British Columbia, developed a technique for creating surreal, glowing images using slide film. It became widely known as Orton Imagery.
A quick explanation: you would make two shots of the same scene, (1) out of focus, wide aperture, one stop overexposed; and (2) in focus, your choice of aperture, 2 stops overexposed. Then sandwich the developed slide frames into the same mount and shoot a dupe (or have a lab do that); in later years you could create a scan. This is a scan of a dupe.
These days a similar effect can be obtained in Photoshop. Michael continues to push creative boundaries - from what I can see, he never was interested in making conventional photos.
I didn't come close to achieving the quality of his work, which you can find online via Google search. But I had fun with it. This shot ran as a 2-page spread in a feature article I wrote for Explore magazine in 2000.
Photographed at French Beach Provincial Park, Vancouver Island, BC (Canada). Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission ©1998 James R. Page - all rights reserved.