HOW TO SHOOT SURREAL PHOTOGRAPHS

Surreal photography was originated in France in the early 1920s and is best known for its stunning artworks and writing. The aim of this artistic and intellectual movement is to push the limits of what was practical with a photograph and liberate passion. It gives you a complete and perfect artistic freedom. Surreal photographs deal with creating such photographs which seem to have some sort of special effects. Often photographers carry out different techniques to give surreal its charm.

Above photo by https://www.dylanmhowell.com

Here are some tips which will enable you to get a clear idea on how to shoot surreal photography.

1. The most common technique used in creating surreal photograph is ‘photomontage’. In this process, two or more photos are joined together to make it look like they are a single picture. If you have to capture the moments, select the image of an interesting background and another image of the central subject. Now join the images to make them look like as one.

2. If you want to create a surreal atmosphere for your photos and videos, focus on the subject and then use blurring effects in your camera and post production. The blurring process becomes easy by lowering the aperture of the camera. You can even edit the image and duplicate the image layer in Photoshop if you feel like.

3. You can create some excellent surreal photographs by using shutter speeds of your camera. Shutter speeds last for just a flick of seconds. Use fast shutter speed to freeze a moving subject and use slower speeds to depict movement in a photograph of a moving subject. Shutter speeds have an ability to blur motion which can result in a dreamlike effect.

4.  An impressive way to create a surreal effect in your photograph is to let your subject Float.  You can use a chair or stool so that it becomes easy to remove in Photoshop later to hold your subject up as if it is in the air. In order to achieve this effect, you must keep your camera in manual mode and disable the auto focus option. Make sure that you use a tripod to keep the position of everything in two pictures very close.  Open both the images in Photoshop with the background image being your bottom layer and the floating image on top.

5. The Sabatier effect or Polarization is a technique to make an image partially or fully reversed in tone. This technique includes a partially developed film which is exposed to light while it is being developed. By turning the light in the darkroom for a short-lived moment, you can expose the partially developed film.

6. An amazing optical illusionary technique to distort reality is by using the camera perspective. This effect is used to make an object look smaller or closer to the lens and make it look larger in the frame. Try to apply some control and manipulation in the sizes of things in the images which will help you to make scenes look bizarre and contradictory to reality.

7. Although black and white images have surreal qualities to them, you can still wish to add a few colors to selected parts or region which can give it a more stunning look. Do not forget to highlight and add different tones to a certain object which will allow you to give different effects and aesthetics.