Photography Magazine

A photomontage is the result you get when you use two or more images to make one composite result image. Like almost everything else in today’s world, there are two ways to make a photo montage – the old fashioned ‘manual’ method, and the digital one. 

The art of photo manipulation can be traced back to the initial years of photo process discoveries. However, photo montages were first made around the time of the First World War. At this time, montages were made using the double exposure techniques, and by placing objects on contact print machines. People also found it very amusing to make postcards of different heads on different bodies! In today’s world, the most common place photo montages we see are on cinema posters. Today, montages are made on computers using Photoshop, all over the world. You could make your own montages. Maybe you have a few family images you would want to put into one single frame…the key to an acceptable montage, at least by today’s standards, is to seamlessly add images to the frame. Meaning, the images should NOT look like they’ve been ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ from elsewhere. Let us go ahead and try and make a simple photo montage of just two images.

First, decide on the print size of your final image. We made our montage of 6 by 8 inch size. Open Photoshop. Open a new file under FILE-NEW. Enter the relevant parameters of resolution and width and height  on the dialogue box that pops up. Remember, you need to set resolution (DPI) to 300 for print, and 72 for web usage. Next, select the image that you would like to use for the montage. We open the two images that we need, which gives us three image boxes on our work space – 2 photographs, and one canvas for the final image.

Next, we cut out the areas of interest from both root images, and paste them into our final image canvas area. Instead of using accurate selection tools such as the pen tool, we suggest you make simple, basic selections using something like the lasso tool. Making montages is not very hard work! Just make a basic selection outline with one motion of the mouse, and then feather the selection to something like 50 radius on a 4 by 6 300 dpi root file. If that confuses you, no sweat…simply experiment with various feather densities until you are able to get a good fade-out affect when you paste the copied image into the canvas. To recap, we

1. Select an outline
2. Feather
3. Copy-Paste into the new canvas

Do this for both (or however many images you are using) image.

We took things one step further by converting the entire image to black and white and then adding the brownish sepia touch to it (refer to our article on sepia toning to learn how you could do this).

There is no real definition of an amateur camera, or an amateur photographer for that matter. The basic difference between an amateur photographer and a professional one is that the amateur doesn’t make money from his or her craft, while the pro makes a living out of it. For the sake of this article however, let us look at some of the lesser priced models, and the compacts and the semi-pro cameras.

Most people who buy cameras for everyday use, intend taking photographs at family get-togethers and portraits. For this purpose, a portable pocket camera that is light and easy to use is the need of the hour. The Olympus MJU series are perfect for this kind of use, are the Canon PowerShot models and the Nikon Coolpix series. As with the professional models, Nikon and Canon lead the markets with compacts as well. Olympus, Fuji and Pentax too make great digital cameras, and are usually lower priced as compared to Canon and Nikon. Casio and Panasonic make some pretty interesting models, Panasonic using Leica lenses and Casio making some very compact cameras that easily fit into a shirt pocket or a purse. All said and done though, it is only your own personal requirement that determines the kind of camera you ought to purchase. If you are completely new to photography and do not want to be bothered with things like focus, exposure and all that, we suggest a totally automatic compact camera. Some of the latest features to hit the compacts include image stabilization and face detect. Image stabilization ensures blur-free pictures even in low light conditions, and face detect ensures that the camera focuses on the subject’s face even if it is located off the center of your frame, giving you in-focus subjects at all times.  

So how about a camera for those who wish to take everyday photographs as mentioned above, but also want some creative control over the settings? Semi-professional cameras offer SLR-like features at a lower price and weight to their big sisters, the SLRs! For example, you may not be able to use interchangeable lenses, but a semi pro like the Panasonic Lumix series will give you a lens with a wide zoom range. Also, a semi pro may give you the advantage of a hot shoe, allowing you to use an external flash (on camera or studio light). And then of course, the semi pro models allow you manual override on focus, shutter speed and aperture to name a few settings. All in all, if you are a traveler who like sto take a few creative photographs on your journeys, or if you are a beginner wanting to learn the craft, a semi pro model will do you good.

Again, it is only your personal requirement that should finally decide the camera you buy. Before you go to the camera dealers, you should at least have an idea of the type of camera you want – a compact, a semi-pro model or an SLR or beyond.