What to do with Photos that Don’t Make the Cut

I’m no Photoshop expert.  I’ve taken some classes a long time ago, I made a pretty cool composite, but then slowly forgot most of what I learned.  I use photoshop mainly for color or manipulating color, exposure, contrast or if I need to clone something simple out or quickly touch up pimples.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about photographers that have slightly blurred images then merge them with a texture or perhaps a photo of a canvas to make them look like a painting.  If you’ve seen my abstracts, you’ll know that try to mimic that painterly look straight out of the camera using motion and/or blur.

I originally thought about shooting a blank canvas, then I thought perhaps it needed to be painted and that freaked me out a bit, because I know nothing about painting.  I remembered a picture of a rusty garage door I shot the day before.  I’m not sure why I shot that, it’s very boring on it’s own.  It was in shade so there was no cool lighting effect.  I thought, why not start with that.  I had some photos I shot in studio just before covid.  I had a million ideas that day and none of them were working.  The whole day was a bust.   I took the photo next to me with the blurred crystal in front (I mean, it was ugly, what was I thinking? But I am a true believer in making mistakes to find out what works and what doesn’t.  In the end this ugly photo worked) and merged it with the rotated garage door.  I played around with the blending modes and opacity, then I tried black and white, then settled on a black and white model and color garage door.  I couldn’t believe how easy this was.  I tried another with the garage door.  It needed more, so I added another photo to part of the image.  I tried another with the garage door all with different blending modes and model images.

My obsession began.  It was all I could think about the next day.  I tried another photo with an image of bags of bricks that I shot in Sri Lanka.  I decided I didn’t want to spend time looking through all my photos for textures.  So I left with my camera.  In one block and probably 10 minutes, I shot 70 textures.  I rushed home to my computer. and got to work.

My back is really hurting by this point and I need an outfit change at least!  I promised the following day, I’ll change up the outfit.  Can you believe how great these photos look?  I should probably show you a before and after because I’m sure you don’t believe how ugly and boring these portraits were before the textures were added.  I mean what was I thinking with that big white box, the rubber gloves, the pearls, the poses?  I honestly never thought these photos would see the light of day.

I was having so much fun.  It was like darkroom days again.  I used to live in the darkroom.  I had a darkroom in my bathroom at one point in my life.  The experimenting and seeing your photo come to life was so exciting.  I finally felt that same excitement again.  The next day I had an outfit change, then I had some photos of the model’s sister I experimented with.  I’ve now run out of ugly portraits and need some new ones.  When school opens again and I can be back in studio, I’ll be sure to take some ugly portraits.  Or maybe this method would look even better with great portraits.  I’ll have to experiment.  I’ll have to experiment with non portraits too.  Why not?  I have all time in the world right now waiting for covid to come to an end.

Ah yes, the outfit change.  The featured image is the outfit change and my favorite shot of them all.  All it was was a textured window with white bars.  I even thought it was a stupid idea when I shot it.  You just never know what you can do with your stupid ideas hahaha.  Here is one final shot.  I quite like this one as well.

I hope you are all having fun with your experiments 🙂