Double Exposed Portraits

Portrait photography is a person or group of people that displays the expression and the focus of the photograph is usually the person's face or entire body and the background. To split it up a portrait is a photo of a persons face from the front. Portrait pictures show your mood and you can show expression. But a profile picture is the side view of a persons face, only showing one eye. Silhouetting is also a profile picture but its black and it's hard to see the details on the face. Profile photos and silhouetting are similar to portrait pictures because, you can see who the person is. In a photo like this you can see how long their hair is, and if it's straight or wavy.

Double exposures are created in Photoshop by going to file>scripts>load files into stack. Then you rearrange your three images in to a crop of 8.5x11, make sure the crop is even all around your head. When you've done that you use the dodge tool and go around your image till around your images white. After that then you double click on both of your photo layers one at a time and turn it on screen mode so its like you turned the opacity down. When that's done you go to layer>new layer adjustment and you choose one and change it up until you like the image, then you keep adding more until you think its finished. That's how you make a double exposure and why would you want to make one maybe because they look really cool and their also really pretty. Plus most of the time when you make double exposures you can put two symbols that represent you (those would be the two photo layers).

For my two symbols I chose a waterfall and a heart-shaped flower. Why do these two things symbolize me? You my ask, well the waterfall symbolizes me because I love the water and the waterfall shown. This waterfall is a waterfall me and all my friends go on the weekend or on our free time. The flower stands for my love for nature and how its so beautiful.

HDR Photography

HDR means high dynamic range, so you add more range to your pictures. Dynamic range is a range of light to dark in a photo. Instead of just taking one photo, HDR uses multiple pictures all taken at different exposures. HDR is used to make your photos look better, when you used HDR your photos look more detailed. I like using HDR, personally I think it makes your photos look much better and way more detailed. Sometimes when you used HDR it kind of makes your pictures look fake, like if you saw it in person you still wouldn't see what that picture shows.

Well to start off you need to get your pictures. So first you will need a camera that has more than one exposure button they look like this +/-. Then when you have the camera ready put in somewhere steady so it doesn't move too much, you don't want the camera to move. The you press the - (minus) exposure button till its at the lowest level then you take your first picture. To take your second picture you want to press your exposure button again and go one the next whole number up (If you want a lot of pictures to make it even more detailed then you can go through all the mixed numbers as well) when you have moved your exposure up then take another picture, so on and so forth (Keep going) until you have used all the whole number exposure buttons. Then you go to Photoshop, and click on file> automate> merge to HDR, then photoshop will merge your photos together and you can edit them the way want. When your done editing then you press the ok button then press, file, save, change the name to what you want it to be, and then change the .psd file to a .jpg file and your done you have a fully done HDR photo edited and saved. This is kind of different from automatic HDR because you have to do every thing by yourself.

The way I came up with my idea to do the HDR image I did was to get a shot that would have a lot of detail and not much moving in it. My second HDR image was planed out thinking it would be a good photo. I guess that when I take HDR photos I actually just look for a nice view or a nice landscape and take a picture of. Most of the time when I take any kind of photo I will look and say "that would be a nice shot" and then ill look for the right angle and the right lighting and ill take the picture; that's kind of what I did with the HDR photos. I guess if I had to really detail it then I look for the most beautiful shot and then take the pictures.