Kelpies – Magritte style
This is rather rough and ready but an experiment in Photoshop to make an image in an homage to Rene Magritte, a surrealist artist from Belgium noted for pop and conceptual art. His paintings were often very minimalist and sometimes featured a sense of absence or unnatural juxtaposition in some form or other.
This image featuring The Kelpies is inspired by Magritte’s painting of a man in a hat facing away beside a transparent outline of himself in which the full figure blocks the background and the transparent one reveals it. In Magritte’s painting a curtain provides the backdrop to the cut-out figure which allows it to appear. In this Kelpies image I opted to screen the whole image apart from the figures and the see-through to the Kelpies in the background.
The final image is a composite of two photographs taken on location. My camera was tripod mounted to provide a secure and consistent framing across both images. For the shot of the figure the focus was on the figure but there was never going to be enough depth of field to keep the Kelpies in focus too. The second shot, from the same tripod set-up focused on the Kelpies. The rest of the work was in Photoshop using layers and a mask.
With more time, I’ll work on this approach a little more and aim for a much more refined end product, but as a trial piece, I’m happy to have proved the principle.
clunie's focal point 