Leah Johnston- The Blog

BEHIND THE SCENES

THE FINISHED PRODUCT:

Duality, originally uploaded by Leah Johnston.

Duality

Brooke and I both did self-portraits atop a giant boulder near Topanga Canyon. Climbing up was rather scary. You can’t tell from this photo, but we are up very high.

Test shot. Clearly dreading the next part where I have to be topless in public. Especially with that elderly couple off camera left staring at me…

Here’s the shot I ended up editing.

Now if only I could find a skeleton to edit into the photo…Oh, hello there!

Time for Little Bone’s close-up…

And finally, I put it all together!

Originally we were going to wrap me up in duct tape, which I thought would be rather painful in contact with my skin, so I geared up head to toe in this dorky out:

Upon beginning the mummification process, we realized this would look too shiny, so we went back to the store and got a bunch of ace bandages and hoped those would do the trick. Three additional trips to the store later, we finally had enough badage to finish the wrap. Here it is almost complete:

Hardly perfect, but we thought it would have to do. Here is the photo I ended up editing. Scroll down for before and afters:

I am still not sure I chose the right shot, so here are a couple outtakes:

The final product:

I was inspired to create this image when I was driving through Pictou, Nova Scotia and I came upon this 1940′s fighter jet mounted in the middle of an intersection. I wanted to create something noir-ish and I think it turned out somewhat in the vein of Sky Captan and the World of Tomorrow, which is cool. It was surprisingly simple to create- thanks to my new green screen!

Jacob’s Ladder (on top of being a biblical reference) is a real staircase in the park in my hometown. I composited the photo I took of the ladder and the clouds on vacation, with a photo of myself on my apartment building staircase in NY. Then just toyed with hue/sat, curves, filters afterwards. For extra drama, I added a spotlight to the right hand side of the clouds.

I used the top image as the main one, and added the arm from the second image to it, in order to better illustrate the line of the poem “the shadow of a kiss”. Because my feet and legs were so much closer to the camera, they appeared quite large in comparison to the rest of my body in the original. I reduced the size of them greatly for the final image. I also enlarged the bed and edited out the lamp and headboard by means of extensive cloning and painting.