The Cottingley Fairies
In 1920 a series of photos of fairies captured the attention of the world. The photos had been taken by two young girls, the cousins Frances Griffith and Elsie Wright, while playing in the garden of Elsie's Cottingley village home. Photographic experts examined the pictures and declared them genuine. Spiritualists promoted them as proof of the existence of supernatural creatures, and despite criticism by skeptics, the pictures became among the most widely recognized photos in the world. It was only decades later, in the late 1970s, that the photos were definitively debunked.
Again. Alice and myself worked together to interpret these photographs in our own way.
We took two photographs - one of me with my hand being covered by a book and another image of my arm being covered by a pile of books. Then, we cropped the image of the hand coming out from the books to place over the other image. This would create the illusion that the hand was difssapearing from the stood up book and coming through the pile.
However, we faced some problems with this. Firstly,the images were at slightly different angles so aligning the two photographs was difficult as parts of the image were out of line. Secondly, the lighting in the images were slightly varied meaning that it did not blend well and not even the opacity could be changed to fix this as it would make the hand disappear. To try and fix this issue, we croppped the hand as much as possible but it still stood out due to the contrast in colour. Also, in the first image, the arm is less visable due to the dark background so to make the image more obvious, I took off my blazer as my skin tone would contrast with the dark background.
I think that these images were relatively successful because we achieved the illusion that we wanted to. Similtaneously, I dislike these images because I feel the illusion isn;t created due to the differencein colour and poor alignment of the two different photos.
So, Alice and I figured these main issues could be solved through the use of a plain background e.g a white wall or one with less objects obstructing the objective or focus.
Alice and I then acted upon these issues to create a much more preferable image! I feel that thi squality of photoshop is much higher and the idea is a lot better thought through.