By Heinz Richter
I am a firm believer that photographs straight out of the camera are just a beginning. Ansel Adams is still perfectly correct, even in the digital age, when he said, "the negative (digital file) is just the score, the final print is the performance."
Several years ago, before the digital age, I photographed a model in an outdoor scene. It was not a bad effort, and I kept it to this day. A few years later I used my first Leica M, an M8, to photograph several sculpture in an outdoor sculpture garden. Later yet, after moving up to my current M 240, I photographed an outdoor scene which never recived much atention from me, but it is still in my files.
Why do I mention such an odd variety of photopgraphs?
A little while ago I was wondering what could be done to improve each one of those shots, to try to come up with something with more impact. Why not combine two photographs to create a new one?
I used the photograph of the sclupture and combined it in Photoshop with the one of the model. The result was quite interesting and, in my opinion, ended up a worthwhile shot all on its own.
But why stop there?
The unexciting outdoor scene offered a worthwhile background for the combination photograph of the model and the sculpture. I combined it with the unexciting outdoor shot and ended up with, what I think, is one of my better efforts.
For the final version I made one more modification by bending the left arm to a more upright position, to have an additional choice that does not violate the overly puritanical rules of Facebook.
I know that some people are under the impression that only photographs as they come directly out of a camera are considered photographs. I beg to differ. It is virtually impossible for the final image to have come right out of a camera.
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