Multiple exposures and other manipulations

Picture created using layers. The ballet Rite (or Coronation) of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, Nicolas Roerich and Vaslav Nijinsky was first performed in Paris in May 1913. As well as provoking a riot, it seismically shifted the direction of Western music. The scene is Pagan Russia, tribes of people come together to carry out ceremonies, venerate their ancestors and elders and choose a young girl who will have the honour of dancing herself to death to ensure a good harvest. In my picture the spring growth, dancing wildly in the wind, sprouts from the music score of the Sacrificial Dance and the ground is symbolically stained red. The message, in 1913 and 2013, is that no matter how sophisticated your industry and technology is, if the harvest fails you are in trouble. The ballet reflects a time when people were so aware of this that they were prepared to sacrifice something of utmost value to ensure a good harvest. We lose contact with the soil that feeds us at our peril. There are about 100 recordings of this music currently available, countless more archive recordings. Encountering it in my mid-teens, I abandoned rock and pop music as just too tame.

A photo-manipulation made using layers. The coloured image layer has been manipulated to suggest the curvature of the lenses.

Two DNGs merged using layers. The 'jigsaw' layer has been manipulated to suggest distortion behind the curved glass of the lens. Picture taken using smc Pentax-A 50mm f1.7 prime lens. The camera in the picture is Pentax K10D DSLR camera, dating from 2006.

Picture of Yashicamat TLR straight out of the camera. Scanned picture of Grandma tilted and turned into the correct plane, and montaged in, using serif PhotoPlus X5 software. Pentax A 50mm f1.7 prime lens.

Picture created by using layers Pentax A 50mm f1.7 lens on a Pentax K10D. Processed Adobe Lightroom 3 and Photoshop Elements 10.

What would have been a procession of pilgrims a few hundred years ago, has become a procession of tourists. Picture made using a semi-transparent 'edge' layer merged with the original picture, the combined image then adjusted using curves. Serif PhotoPlus X3 software.

Virgin and Child figures in the Lady Chapel at Bayeux Cathedral. The naive central placing of the statue in the frame seems to suit the idea of 'sitting in majesty'.

The beach at Arromanches, Normandy, France, where the invasion of Normandy by 'Allied Forces' began in June 1944. Code named Gold Beach it saw the disembarkment of thousands of fighting men and many tons of war equipment. Overlaid as a semi-transparent layer is a picture of the War Cemetery at Bayeux, where a lot of the men from all nationalities who were killed on the 'Normandy Beaches' are buried.