A-Photo Mag

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).

The famous black and white photographer Ansel Adams (recognized particularly for his zone system and landscape photography) coined the term visualization in the world of photography. To understand black and white composition (or color for that matter) it is extremely important to be aware of what visualization truly means. To put it simply, visualization refers to imagining the final print of the photograph in your mind, before you even press the shutter or plan on your exposure for that matter. It is not as simple as one may believe it to be. The fact is, it is not merely a reproduction of the scene in front of you that you always want on your photographs. You would want to get creative with your depth of field, you may want a certain shade to appear darker than what you see etc. Add to that the fact that you will need to visualize the scene (in fact the print of the final image) in black and white, and that is not something every one of us will be able to do with ease. It is imperative that a black and white photographer learn to see or visualize his or her images in shades of gray rather than in color. Some may find it easy to do so, and some may need time to hone their skills of visualizing. But do remember - visualization is much more important with black and white, although it is required in professional color photography as well.

So, when you compose your image, we see that the first thing you need to do is visualize the final print. Next, you will want to get your exposure readings. While it may seem that exposure is more to do with lighting that with composition, it is not so in black and white photography. The point from where you take your exposure readings can make all the difference to your final print, and you have more of a latitude with black and white film than with color film or digital cameras. Another great plus point while shooting in black and white (film) is the fact that color filters have an effect of darkening out complimentary colors and lightening the same color(as the filter).

In the simpler sense of the word composition, try and find subjects where you have extremes in brightness levels (NOT complimentary color). For example, a scene with strong lighting from one side, and strong shadow on the other would make a very special black and white print. Try shooting portraits against window light and you will see exactly what we mean.

When you begin to play with light and shade on black and white, you will soon see that it has much more of an effect on monotone than on color. A ‘good’ black and white print, it is often said, will have both the extremes of the gray tone - black and white - and a good deal in between. More on the tones later.