Smoke and Mirrors

Scotrail Tests New Flux Capacitor

‘Smoke and Mirrors’ is the theme for Amanda’s Friendly Friday Photo Challenge this week, and that makes me think of magic and illusion. The opening image above is magicked up using photo software, of course.

It’s odd that this is my second post in a row which has featured some photo manipulation when I really don’t do too much of those images at all. I won’t ever even ‘drop in a sky’ in a landscape; I prefer it to be real.

If I do some manipulation, I tend to go to town so that no one is in any doubt that the image has been manipulated – it’s just for fun.

But here’s another magic shot:-

This one involved no photo manipulation (except for cleaning up the image). To do this you just need a yellow card and a black card and pop them behind a half full glass of water and at the right distance the water acts as a lens which switches the position of the yellow and black. Worth a try – choose your own colours.

Again no Photoshop used in the image below. Is this a magical magnifying glass?:-

This one shows its age, because it’s a long time since we had one pound notes in the UK. It was originally shot on slide film, during my first real venture into photography.

Again, with a decent magnifying glass, it just works. The higher denomination note is simply folded and set down to cover the right space on top of the lower denomination note. Because the image is magnified the edges of the folded note are hidden in the image.

The final image below is even older – no photoshop but a bit of pre-digital trickery.

So we had this new kitten called Miffy and she was cute. Kittens like to jump up on their hind legs to claw at toys. Lit by flash from above and behind, I took several images on black and white film. When the film is developed the image of the cat is a few dark marks on a clear negative. So then I put three of these negatives on top of one another together in the enlarger and made a mono print.

This is so old and quality no longer so good. Still it was fun and was a great diversion from difficult times then.

So there is a bit of magic and illusion – hope you liked them! But this week I expect to be back to ‘normal’ photography taking some normal photographs – maybe some nice simple landscapes or nature images – definitely no magic!