Experimenting with Artistic Photographic Styles

When working with photos I tend to lean on the more expressive and artsy side of things, because of the immense amount of potential a photograph can have. The simple idea of a photograph can deliberately be turned into a story telling mechanism. There are countless ways to render a photograph, but the kind I like to focus on are tricking the eye with the camera, photo manipulation techniques, and artistic rendering of the photograph.

One of the first techniques I like to use are tricking the eye into an illusion. Illustrated here is a photograph of a shadow of a couple of leaves, however the eye is tricked into seeing something quit different. What does this photograph instead look like to you?

The second technique I have fun with, is the photo manipulation technique. This technique gives me the freedom to do just about anything I want with two or more images. I can stack them, add more characters, and take ordinary photographs to a different dimension.

These first two images are my very first taste at cutting out images and placing them into the same frame with another image, layering images, and using the opacity tool.

Still using the photo manipulation technique, I layered these images together to create an other worldly place or sense of memory in the image:

 

 

And this last image using the same technique is from a series of images that illustrates a story I wrote about a girl's journey to find her true self, titled, "Tiger Light":

A new interest with working with photographs has come over me; the idea of rendering a photograph to make it look like a painting. Here is the first image I have experimented on, and I feel very pleased with it. What do you think?