Two girls sitting on a wall circa 1960. Scanned From Print. |
A Typical 1960s Snapshot
Special birthdays require something out of the ordinary. Usually people gather together as many embarrassing photographs from the subject's childhood, print them large and use them to decorate the function room of the local boozer with an accompanying banner declaring 'look who's 40'.
In this case the subject was 50 years old and the request was for something interesting to be done with an old black & white photo. |
Subject is colourised and placed in boat with wildlife objects added. |
Interesting
The first and most obvious point to address was the colour. High saturation gives the image a surreal quality as does the addition of blatantly incongruous objects such as the horse, the butterfly and the very shy gnome lurking in the shadows beside the boat.
The back light source is small and would not naturally give us such a vivid blue water but this is far from a natural treatment so, in this instance, reality takes second place to composition.
The virtual foreground light source is diffused and high key and the saturation is higher than would be obtained from a real camera capture. These elements combine to give the image a posterised or pop-art characteristic (though the image is devoid of any meaning or symbolism).
Technically, this is the sort of 'old school' cut 'n' paste that can be achieved equally well with a pair of scissors, some glue and two or three coloured pencils. |
