Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Butterfly on Flower: A Photo Altered with Bleach


This photo of a butterfly on a flower in the garden of my former home was altered using the bleach and water process.

I removed the photo from the solution just before all of the blue layer of emulsion was gone. I wanted to see what the photo would look like if I allowed some of the blue layer to remain. I also wanted the butterfly to still have some color to it.

This was in the solution for a very short time, perhaps 15 seconds. The bleach has removed some of the blue layer but not all of it. Note also that this allows some of the green yucca leaves in the background to still appear to have green tones. You can see some accurate purple tones in the flowers in the lower left hand corner (this is the lavender/lavendula plant). You can see some mottled blue colors in the upper left area of the photo which 'just happened'.

The liatris flower which the butterfly is on remains white as it was in reality.

You can see that the edges of this photo retain the photographic image right up to the edge. This is because I removed it from the solution before the edges were bleached out.

Note that since the bleach did not affect the yellow layer very much, the yellow daylily blossom retains some of the a realistic pastel tone rather than morphing into that other, more shocking yellow tone. (See my other photos for examples of what I mean by that.)

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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Very cool looking. I just recently took a lot of butterfly pics