Manipulating Photos by Hand

I kind of wish I got to experience photo manipulation in the dark room. It is super interesting to me and I would love to make a montage by hand to fully understand the process that goes into it. I think that by manipulating a photo yourself like how they did before photoshop will give you a greater appreciation for the craft. I honestly didn’t think that photo manipulation was possible back in the 1800’s, it’s astonishing to see the products that were made without the help from any digital technology. I learned in high school about film making and the process they went through back then and I had never thought about how similar it was to photo manipulation in photography. Placing images on top of one another to create a compiled negative which is then developed to one awesome photo manipulated image. It’s so fascinating!

Jerry Uelsmann

I find Jerry Uelsmann to be a very talented photographer, he has an amazing eye for montages and creating images with a message. Watching his videos of the process in which he makes his photos really opened my eyes to the efforts that go into photo manipulation. You really have to know what you’re doing to get the best product. Below I have created a gallery of some of Jerry’s work that I find fascinating.

Photoshop: Then and Now

I really enjoy looking at the older photoshopped pictures because it is easier to have an appreciation for the focus and hard work that went into it. The process people had to go through to get a single picture is immense and very dangerous. Jerry Uelsmann is just one of the greats and has been doing this for so long that his work has become well-known for his dark room photos. Photoshop techniques have changed dramatically over the many years going back to the 1800’s. Now we are making a couple of clicks on a computer system instead of using techniques that normally would take 30 minutes in the dark room. His drive for the old fashioned ways is inspiring because there are always fewer and fewer people passing on the talents of how things used to be. I appreciate that technology is creating faster and less stress worthy programs for photoshop. Back then if someone were to mess up their picture, the picture would be ruined and they would have to start over till it’s right. Dark rooms are what shaped the world of photoshop and what bore the new age of photoshop programs.

Dark Room Deception

These readings were quite interesting because it opened my eyes a little more about how today we have it so easy, just by the click of a button we can change reality (in a way). Back in the early 1900’s there was no such thing as cell phones and apps that could change the way a person looks, it was all done in a dark room which I think interests me the most. I have learned about this type of manipulation in film classes that I have taken where in the film like Trip to the Moon and The Great Train Robbery where these types of manipulations were used to create something incredible back then. In learning about these films and photographs its quite interesting to compare them because everyone believed what they were looking at was completely real. Obviously today we can notice when things are fake or real because of photoshop editing. I still don’t exactly understand how some of these photographs were made back in the early 1900’s due to their preciseness and how one could physically put that together only in a dark room, it’s quite amazing. Now that we have technology to do much more with this manipulation it just goes to show how we have transformed as a world full of art and how the use of expressive imagination can be used.

Before Photoshop…

I was surprised to learn that photo editing has been around as long as photos themselves had. It was interesting to see the humor and creativity from so long ago and how similar it is to ours today despite such limited technology. What we can do in a second now, back then took them lots of practice and time to master. They would have to manually cut out and paste images to others, or take a picture using the same film to get similar editing effects to today. The simple fact that we have an undo button makes what we have today ten times easier than what they had before. If they messed up, one or both of their images could be rendered completely useless. It’s wonderful and poetic that Jerry Uelsmann continues to use old techniques for photo editing instead of today’s technology. In general, I thought it was cool to understand the origins of photo editing and to be able to appreciate how technology has made this process easier.

Photography Before Photoshop

All of these articles were extremely interesting to me, because they explained how artists were able to create these surreal pictures by just using darkroom techniques. Watching the videos of Jerry Uelsmann creating some of his works really showed how complex the process of creating these images used to be, and its truly inspiring to watch someone like him go through the process. Nowadays, creating montages like these is as simple as the click of a few buttons so being able to see it done by someone who’d worked with these types of photography before photoshop was around is amazing.

Overall Response

Both the articles and videos show a whole new side of graphic design that many people didn’t believe was possible before computer programs like photoshop were created. It’s amazing to see designers and artists creating these pieces with so much emotion and story behind them simply by using photographs and dark rooms. The process is truly inspiring to watch and it sheds a light on how long graphic design has actually been around.