The PK Perspective

location: My place   Wed 14/7/10

The Weather had taken a turn for the worse and I was bored of waiting for the cat to give me a urine sample (not an easy thing to do) so I decided to do a multiplicity shot to pass the time. Recently I’ve had some training days that have explored mental health problems, including Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a very interesting mental health problem, when suffering form it the mind does some amazing but very disturbing things. There is the visual hallucinations along with the audible ones and although there are a few recorded incidents about the ‘voices’ saying nice things the vast majority hear and see very negative things, which I feel must say something about humanity. It has existed throughout time and is thought to be what was happening when people were seeing and hearing demons. But guess you could argue it was responsible for people hearing God and angels too. Also psychic mediums could be seen as schizophrenic as they display many of the symptoms, they just know how to control it and make money from it. The training also dispelled the myth that a schizophrenic is more dangerous than someone who isn’t, there is no evidence of this and just like the general public personality plays a part, some are nasty, some nice after all they are just as human as the rest of humanity.  I also learned that 1 in 5 schizophrenics get better within 5 years, 1 in 3 will get better but with some remaining symptoms and only 1 in 5 will continue to have the troublesome symptoms.

Anyway this all inspired me to do a multiplicity on the subject. Multiplicity is made up of several shots put together. To do this 1st you need the shots so it was out with the tripod. I set the camera up with an ISO of 800, as the light was poor to the bad weather, and a F number of 11. After a couple of shots I decided to use the off camera flash to enhance light and detail. As I had no one else to shoot I used myself. In order to do this I used the shutter release remote (another cool gadget I have for the Nikon) which allows me to take a shot without being behind the camera. Then leaving the camera on the tripod I moved around, got changed and changed my hair to get the different characters for the shot.  After about 40 shots I decided I had enough to work with and uploaded them. I then chose the main shot, with the main character and opened it in photoshop. Working with this shot as a center I chose the next character that would fit in to interact with the main one. With this 2nd shot open in photoshop I selected the character in question using the magic wand tool (holding down shift to select more than one area until the whole figure was selected) and copied it over to the main shot on a new layer. Using a new layer for each character means if you make a major mistake you can just delete the layer and not have to start the entire thing from scratch. Once both characters were on the same photo I moved around the 2nd one until in the right position and then using the earser tool rubbed out the bits which needed to seem to be behind the main character. To finish off character 2 I cloned in any bits missed out by the magic wand from the original shot and then brightened her a bit and made her slightly transparent by reducing the opacity of the layer. I then repeated this process for the other 2 characters and once I was happy with them and their positioning I flattened the image before saving it. Then noticed I had a foot missing and had to clone that in too! stupid foot! The finished shot was not perfect but I’m happy enough with it, even if it did take over an hour to work up in photoshop.

The finished image