After working with some of my digital photographs from japan I felt the need to explore the richness of the film images. Instead of expanding this photographs and using the ‘content aware’ functions I chose to return to experimenting with blending the images together. I felt the film images had a lot more substance in terms of conveying a real atmosphere of the place. It felt right that I was there shooting on a Japanese camera contain a roll of Japanese film and capturing these enthralling environments that surrounded me. I set out picking out photos that I felt would work together and simply overlay them in photoshop first. Here I could see the shapes and compositions had potential to work with each other. I wanted to blend the images instead of simply overlaying them as when you overlay to images digitally often it produces this strange masked effect that really dulls out the beauty of the colour and richness of the tones. I then began to pick out specific areas and sections I thought might mix well together, once selecting the layers I let the algorithmic process take over and appeared these twisted crossovers of imagery. Suddenly a train line ran straight through a hectic department store. Or the illuminated neon signs on the street dissolved into an arcade game.
I feel that these creations really start to resonate what its like to be engulfed within the mesmerising Japanese culture. When friends asked me what it was like being in Tokyo, a city with on of the largest metropolitan areas in the world, I would just show them some of these images to try and explain the overwhelming amount of visual information that fills your eyes at all times. Even though I felt that the unedited images themselves created quite a nice portrait of the country, these composites reveal much more in terms of transporting us into these captivating environments.
