Creative Problem Solving - Ghostly Self Portraits
When putting up our christmas decorations this year, my partner had the beautiful idea of creating an archway out of spare fairy lights on a blank bit of wall. Such a simple idea but we immediately fell in love. I knew straight away I wanted to take self portraits with it.
Now, I admit I was very lazy in my attempt. The lights were connected to our little tree, so I couldn’t really move the tree out of the way to get a clean shot (which I would have loved). So I thought to myself, oh I’ll just sort it in Photoshop later.
I’m writing this post-photoshop experimenting. THIS WAS HARD.
We’re dealing with shadows, light, alcoved walls, skirting boards and wooden flooring. Not fun.
I tried to crop in different ways, but I really did want the full length of me; there is something so important about the legs and feet in these images, travelling through this mysterious portal. Cutting them off felt like half a story. Because I wanted the full length, my options narrowed, so I had to think outside of the box.
The only crop I did love, was when I zoned in on my blurry figure, cutting out the lights altogether. It feels not dissimilar to Edward Munch’s Scream.
Before we get too wacky, I wanted to really honour my favourite ghostly-walking of the bunch, so I got rid of the radiator and plug outlet using a combination of content aware fill and cloning, and then shifted the whole image over to the left (because I could not for the life of me remove that damn tree). I clicked the content aware box when cropping and this filled in all the negative space that was to the left.
I love this shot so much. I love being able to see the skirting board through my legs, my feet in motion. It really feels like a door I’m about to pass through.
Now to experiment a bit! I’ve been pinning a lot of really interesting collages lately and it’s freed my brain up to try and mess around with layering and piecing textures together to make a more impactful and interesting image. I adored this pose and refused to admit defeat by my pesky surroundings!
I love the angle of my arms and wanted to accentuate that through splicing me up and staggering the image. I used another photo from the batch and enlarged it in the background so I just had a wall texture, and then layered the radiator-free version on top. I then took my polygonal lasso tool and held shift to make a diagonal line through the image. Then with a simple drag, I moved myself to the left to create a stagger. A few minor adjustments later and I just love the result.
Another image I couldn’t lose to my badly prepared laziness, was this ghostly embrace below. The motion of the arms over my body, the movement in the dress, it makes me feel things. Although the scene is quite beautiful on its own, really, I didn’t want these to be themed Christmas photos. So I had to figure it out.
I leant into the ghostly transparency and opened up a crop that I shared earlier, and layered the above image on top. I lowered the layer opacity to about 50%, duplicated it and moved the two images around until I found a good position, and then erased the edges of the images. After more tinkering, this was the first result:
Two ghostly apparitions, one more prominent than the other, and another figure looking back as if in a mirror or a painting, framed by an arch of light.
I like it! The figure on the right gives the image a different narrative which I enjoy, but I did want to focus on just embrace as well.
I kept the base image the same, and then layered in 3 duplicates of the embracing-ghost shot. I wanted it to feel dreamlike, like we were seeing the embodiment of what she is feeling in that moment. I kept one figure central and more prominent, and moved the others either side of her, fiddling with the eraser to push them into the background more and more. The result is ethereal and otherwordly, and I’m quite obsessed.
I’m very glad I didn’t give up after failing to remove my Christmas tree from these pictures. And also, if I’d had a clear space like I’d wanted, I wouldn’t have needed to problem solve, and I probably wouldn’t have arrived at these final images. I owe my tree an apology actually.
I hope this inspired you to either mess around in Photoshop a bit, or to not give up if something is proving tricky in the edit. There’s always a way around these things and creativity has no bounds! You can explore and experiment til your hearts content. And you never know, you might land on a beautiful happy accident.
See you soon,