Haven't done a post this year yet. Victim of the unexplainable shiftless syndrome.
Thought up this idea while walking home, my dad and I had been working down at the neighbors (another reason I've been doing less photography lately, unexpected work)
Anyway. This idea.
I took about 20-30 images of the same composition while going through the total range of focus possible for the image. Shooting at a low angle, low aperture, close to my subject, with a telephoto lens (for increased magnification, as lens type doesn't effect DoF) allowed me a rather shallow depth of field. The result being a wide selection of images I could then choose to combine, picking out parts of the image to highlight.
For the above image I simply cut the two photographs from the opposite sides of the focus range in half and combined them, the bottom image being three photographs divided horizontally. I think the top image is more successful, although the halving is a bit off center. It has a simplicity to it. Although the bottom image scores points for my dad calling it "trippy."
The process was obviously rushed, there are clear stability issues as I didn't shoot using my remote. Think it might work better as a film process, at least as far as the combining of the images is concerned. I could be more selective in my focus highlighting in the darkroom. Would that I could.
This process really put me in mind of the "Frankencamera" project (http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/camera-2.0/). If I had a camera that I could program, I could tell it to run throught the focus range without me touching it. I could even tell the camera to ignore the parts of the image not in focus to help me put it back together. Ah well.
So it goes.
