Kibo …

There are many cloned images where the same person appears several times in the frame, but few of them involve the person interacting with themselves - they’re mostly just the same person in different, sometimes overlapping, poses. They’re a bit boring.

Creating these images where the same person appears several times isn’t particularly difficult. It just takes some thought beforehand. The image on the right is made up of four frames, though it could be done with three if you get the lighting right.

The key to this image is placing the glass - it’s the only part of the photo that’s fixed in place. I used some thin rubber Sticky Fickers to attach the glass to the tripod, and then I just tilted the head so that it looks right for pouring lager into. (Image 1)

I mounted the camera on another tripod, focused on the glass and ran a few test shots so that I could set the shutter speed and exposure in manual mode. The flash (Nikon SB600) was mounted on the camera and bounced off the ceiling at 60°. This gave even lighting across the frames without any nasty highlights.

Once I was happy with the exposure and framing, it was time to get in there and start posing. Now, I very rarely in photographs so this is not something I was particularly comfortable with. I just tell people that I don’t smile because I’m enigmatic. I’m the photographer, not the subject. Unfortunately, I had to pose for this myself.

I took Image 2 first, “holding” the glass in my right hand to obscure part of the tripod head - this would make removing it in PaintShop Pro X easier later. I looked at where I thought my eyes would be in Image 3 to give a sense of interaction with Me Two. It was a best-guess, and I think it worked out pretty well.

Image 3 was a bit trickier because I wanted to get some movement in the pouring and the lager was going flat. It was also important to get the timing right so that you could see that something was being poured into the glass. I started pouring quite slowly and then released the shutter. After two seconds I poured faster in time for the shutter release.

The fourth image is the blank. This is the background image in PSP, or the image that I opened first. I then stacked the other images on top in their own layers and just used the “Eraser” tool to remove the appropriate parts of each image. It takes a bit of care to go around the detail, but the whole process took about half an hour - from photographing the images to uploading to Flickr.

I probably should have done the dishes before I did this, though.

Notes
Taken (as JPEG) with a Nikon D50 and the kit 18-55mm lens, with a Nikon SB600 mounted on the hot-shoe. The camera was set on IR firing with a three second timer. This meant that I didn’t have to press the shutter release button and rush to get in position. The timer delay also gave me time to hide the remote.

The glass was mounted on a really old Miranda tripod (”borrowed” from my dad about 8 years ago), with Sticky Fixers stuck between the bottom of the glass and the tripod head. The camera was mounted on a small Jessop’s tripod on another work surface.

Edited in PaintShop Pro X.

For EXIF information, and to see my other photos, visit my Flickr photostream.