MIRROR – RORRIM

 

Now is the time . . . 

If you are like me, and you live somewhere that experiences seasons, you know now is  the Winter of our discontent.   I do not enjoy Winter as I don’t have the opportunities to shoot Infrared like I do the rest of the year.  That, and I am not real found of the cold, …but let’s not go there.   Winter is my time to reflect back on what I’ve shot and then try and get a little artsy.

Mirror images are a great way to create something new based on old work.   The techniques has been around for a long time and it is not real difficult to set up.  You simply take an image, copy it and then flip it and attach to the original image.

The trick is starting with the right image, and then picking the right spot to crop for the mirror effect.

Here’s some examples of mirrored images.

The original image was made at last years Great Smoky Mountains Workshop, in Super Color Infrared.

Here’s a moody house by a lake.

It’s really just a small boat house in a park.

The interesting thing is when you mirror an image, often you will see shapes  take form.  For example, in the image above; do you see the face in the center in the clouds?  I did not create that one, it just became visible when I made the mirror image.

How about this one?  

Do you see the Heart?  The face?  Angel wings?

I will admit, I saw some of this before I started and that’s why I cropped it where I did.

One more.

I see a lions face in the center of the image.  Do you see it?

So, let’s make a mirror image.

I’m going to start with this.

This was also made at last years Great Smoky Mountains Workshop.  It’s a Super Color Infrared image that has been color channel swapped.

Once I have my image open in Photoshop, I need to create a new canvas for my mirror image.

I’ll click File, then New.

 

Since I know that my original is 8×10, I’m going to create a larger canvas that is more than twice the width of my original.  In this case  22 inches wide and 9 inches high.  This gives me some wiggle room, and I’m going to just crop it out when I get done.  Here’s my new canvas.

Now I need to decide where to crop my original image.  Using the Rectangular Marquee Tool I’m going to decide what part of this image to use.

In this case, I’m going to mark this image cropping off the area to the left.

Then I will select Image, and Crop.

Now I’ve got the image I’m going to mirror.

I will drag this image into the new white canvas I created, putting it all the way to the right

 

Next, I’m going to flip the image.  To do this I click Image, Image Rotation, Flip Canvas Horizontal.

Then I am going to drag the same image into the canvas again, line the two up, and crop out the unneeded canvas.

And here’s my mirror image.

Now . . . Do you see it?  I honestly didn’t until I pieced the two images together.  We have faces in the image.  I didn’t realize it was there when I cropped the image.

I’m an animal person, so I see a monkey and a dog.  What do you see?

That’s all there is to making a mirror image.  Once you try it, it’s not that hard, and it is interesting  to see what you find.  It’s definitely better than going out in the cold.

I hope you found this useful and will try and make your own mirror images.  If you do and create something you like, consider sharing it on our Facebook page.  You can find us here 

If you want to see more mirror images, click here.