Photo of the Month – Fun With Mirrors

Hi Folks:

This being April 1, I thought the image below would be appropriate for the photo of the month for March.  Back in the film days I used to do things like create photo montages by sandwiching two slides together into a single frame, but when I first got into graphics programs (CorelDraw 3) I started being more creative with a few of my images.  One technique is to take an image, cut it in half either horizontally or vertically, take one half and mirror it, then stick the two halves together again.  The results are always unknown and often unexpected.  I did a blog post a while back on ‘Making Mirror Images With Lightroom‘ that showed one way of making such images while making them look realistic at the same time but ‘realism’ isn’t always a necessary goal.

For the final image in this post, I simply used my cell phone camera and an app that did everything automatically (a subject of a future blog post).  I created ten mirrors using this technique that I was happy with; you can find them on our Flickr and 500px pages (see the links at the right of the page).  The initial image is of a wonderful garry oak tree at Rithet’s Bog, an area that’s a local favourite of ours.  The image started out as this:

Garry Oak at Rithet's Bog

It was the moon behind the branches that I really wanted to capture, but with a cell phone camera it turned out ‘nice’ but nothing extraordinary.  I took the top half of the frame and flipped it upside down and it came out looking like this:

Fun With Mirrors - Lake Reflection?

This image received the most popular response of the ‘mirrors’ I’ve done so far.  I named it ‘Fun With Mirrors – Lake Reflection?’ because it looks somewhat like a tree growing in water, taken on a still day.  Garry oak couldn’t grow in water, but one must have some artistic license…

Now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

P.S. You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

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