In the 1980s a man by the name of Michael Orton wrote an article on photography. In it he presented images of a kind that no one had ever seen the like of before. Today, these types of images are a mainstay of any photographer who wants to give a painterly or ethereal look to their photos; the technique has become known as the Orton Effect and below you can see an example of one of my pictures that has been given the Michael Orton treatment.
Back then he was doing this using film and, frankly, I have no idea how you would go about doing that because I have never worked with film. I can say that it is very easy to create digitally. I won't give a detailed step by step guide here but basically the steps are these: take your original image, slightly overexpose it, duplicate it, apply a Gaussian blur to the duplicate and then overlay the sharp image with the blurred one. It won't work for every picture, some work better than others and I haven't figured out yet what the formula for a good result is. I tried a few that didn't really do anything for me before I got to this one; which happens to be of possibly my favourite photo I have ever taken.
The Orton Effect, then, is a strange one; it seems to increase and decrease the level of detail all at the same time. It is difficult to describe what it does to an image but people tend to use words like romantic and emotional when trying to do so. My preference is painterly.
No comments:
Post a Comment