Erik Johansson photography started when he first got his camera at the age of 15 and it mixed well with his early passion for drawing. Some think that the process of photography ends when you press the triggers, but for Erik Johansson, it begins there. He wanted to create something different, something that starts when he presses the trigger not the other way around.
In this conference, he takes the example a photograph of a road construction site to which he added (a tic tac toe drawing in the middle of the street) and other photographs like a portrait of a harbor pouring water, a room inception and a man ironing himself… these photo look impossible but in the same time, they retain an incredible degree of realism. He says that this is not something you can really capture using a camera but it doesn’t deny that at some point he wished that he could; these photographs are made for the purpose to make you look at them and try to figure out the trick that made the look possible and impossible at the same time. It’s more about capturing an idea than capturing a moment; the trick that makes them look realistic is something about the details, the colors and the light that creates the illusion.
Sometimes the perspective is the illusion; the basics are pretty simple as reality is like pieces of a puzzle, you take different pieces and put them together to create whatever illusion you want. To clarify the idea, he took the example of 3 cubical blocks arranged to show the 3D dimensional aspect of the space. Combined with each other, they can create another 3 dimensional object that in the same time can and can’t exist; the trick here is to trick our brains to believe this despite that it doesn’t make sense.
What makes a photograph realistic are the things that we don’t notice despite their existence around us in our daily lives, but when combining photographs, these things become really important to consider so that the photo doesn’t look wrong somehow.
There are 3 simple rules to follow in order to achieve realistic results you should consider these 3 crucial elements:
- Perspective
- Type of light
- Making sure that it’s impossible how the image was composed.
So by matching colors, brightness and borders of the photographs we can give the illusion of one possible-impossible photography.
He shows next a photograph of a half underwater fish which back is an island. He says that you might think that this photo is composed of 2 photographs only but it has really been composed from multiple photos taken from different locations and perspectives: he spent months planning for this one photograph: the fish photograph has been taken during a trip while the landscape images are taken from different parts of the world.
There is no limit to what you can do, but the only thing that limits us is our imagination.
Here is the full video of Erik Johansson’s conference
http://youtu.be/mc0vhSseGk4
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