Digital 'film swap' /double exposures

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01steven

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I'm a big fan of the whole Lomo/Holga/toycamera scene, although I haven't yet taken the plunge myself.

I understand there's a whole culture of film exchange - people taking a roll of film, then sending it to someone else (often on the other side of the world, maybe even a stranger) for them to shoot again.

The double exposure results are unpredictable, but often extraordinary.

This flickr group will give you an idea of what I mean
http://www.flickr.com/groups/urban_idea
but it's film, not digital.

I find the idea of visually combining scenes from different worlds very intriguing- - the French countryside with a birthday party in Rio or a piano in Johannesburg with workers in a factory in Warsaw etc.

And, apart from the aesthetic, I'm interested in the cultural benefits - who knows what friendships/bridges can be built this way too.

I have to admit I'm simply too hooked on the convenience of digital to start shooting film and physically posting rolls of film across the world, so would like to know if this is happening already in the digital world?

If this is going on, please can someone show me where?
If not, is anyone interested in getting this off the ground?
 
How can it be :thinking:

I mean what would you do, merge files or something, merging files doesn't require postage around the world..

what are you suggesting exactly...:)
 
then there'd be the inevitable ego-battles as to which layer went on the bottom, and how intense the overlaid image was.

The whole film swap idea creates interesting images as happy accidents - don't see how you could "engineer" these without losing the "accident" part. Take that away and it's merely a photoshop exercise.
 
joxby said:
How can it be :thinking:

I mean what would you do, merge files or something, merging files doesn't require postage around the world..

what are you suggesting exactly...:)
Click to expand...

sorry, not sure I made myself clear.
Person A takes a photo in Location A
Person B takes a photo in Location B

Person A emails his photo to person B.
Person B creates a new 'double-exposure' image (sorry, I don't know the specific Photoshop technique here but it's undoubtedly possible to layer one over the other as in the pictures in the group I mentioned in the post).

Is that clearer?

I can't believe no-one's thought of this before. Particularly as it's seemingly such a big thing in the film world.
 
I've done similar things before in creating ATC (Artist Trading Cards). they were called Digital Jam - (Basically like a musicians jam session.)

Rather than just blending images, as you would have to with film though, it worked like this.

first person would create a file - a base photo if you like. Then forward it to the next participant, they would then manipulate the image, either in a photo manipulation programme, or by adding elements to the image, once they had done their bit it was passed on to another artist and so on.

We started out with a clear path of where the image would go.

So create a group of 4 artists, each to create a base image, then decided which order they would be passed in, and so on. then once all 4 have made their mark on each of the other images, we would share the results.

It works better in practice than in words. we did create a Flickr group to facilitate them, and make it easier to post and collect images.... But of course I can't remember how to access it.
:bang:
 
I think doing it in digital loses the element of surprise. If you are merging digital images you would be tempted to try something else if the first idea didn't work. With film, it's there forever.


Steve.
 
Steve Smith said:
I think doing it in digital loses the element of surprise. If you are merging digital images you would be tempted to try something else if the first idea didn't work. With film, it's there forever.


Steve.
Click to expand...

Yes.

I think the two ideas are totally different. the randomness of double exposing film is what makes that idea work, but there is no way of predicitng the end results.

whereas with the digital jam, everything is planned manipulation, and is a more purposeful art than random effect.
 
I think I can see what the idea is. I've tried this myself on mine using Overlays on the camera itself. Unfortunately it's not as nice or easy to do on my camera anyway (Nikon D60).

To do it on mine you have to
- switch to raw image mode
- take 2 pics
- in the menu go to the retouch -> image overlay.
- select the images you want to overlay and the transparency

What would be really nice is if you could give the camera an "overlay setting" and it would automatically start overlaying all the new images as you take them in the same order as already on the memory card.

Can any of the higher end models do this?
 
If there was, would you send your camera to Kathmandu for the second "overlay" frame ?

I'm afraid the idea is just nothing like a film swap, I'm not saying it wouldn't be an interesting exercise, but fundamentally its just not possible to do anything similar with digital.
 
joxby said:
If there was, would you send your camera to Kathmandu for the second "overlay" frame ?
Click to expand...

Of course not :LOL:

Seeing as it's digital you obviously don't need to do this. Photographer "A" can zip up the images, email, and "B" bangs them on their disk. Then start "overlaying" with your photos. But as I said I don't know if this setting or feature is available on higher range cameras to automatically do this.
 
Hmm.

I think this is possible.

Person A shoots X frames on digital (let's say 36.)

Person B shoots 36 frames on digital.

Both upload the images at a pre-arranged resolution. Say for two D300 owners, both would choose 4288x2848. They would both upload highest quality JPEGs.

A bit of magic code (pretty simple to write) on the website wangs the images together and there you go. No manual intervention, no arguments no fuss. Just choose who is shooting first and what resolution the images need to be for both photographers to supply JPEGs.

If you want the code could emulate losing the roll in the post, lying about tracking numbers, being out when the postie comes, etc. etc.
 
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