Experimental Photography Further Techniques

Harris Shutter Technique

Background“The Harris Shutter was invented by Robert Harris of Kodak for making color photographs with the different primary color layers exposed in separate time intervals in succession. The term Harris shutter is also applied to the technique or effect.” http://www.photographyblogger.net/how-to-do-the-harris-shutter-effect/

How Do They Do It?

The finished effect is created by exposing the same frame of film through green, red and blue filters, whilst keeping the camera still. This will generate different colours around any object that moves within that frame. Good examples of things that are interesting to shoot are Waterfalls, clouds or people/cars moving.

This effect can be produced in a number of different ways, the first of which is the most traditional “In camera” method. You must use a camera that allows in-register multiple exposures and has the ability to change the filters on the front of the lens.

Another method would be to create a drop filter that had three coloured gels and two opaque sections that would be dropped through a filter holder during the pictures exposure thus giving you the three separate colour images.

In this technological age this style and effect can also be created digitally using photo editing suites such as Photoshop. The photographer could use any camera and take three images in succession in a specific location, they could then use software to extract each different coloured exposure. So you would take the red from one photo, the blue from another and the green from the final shot and combine them. Using this method it also allows you to correct any accidental camera movement or camera shake.

Multiple Exposure Technique

Multiple Exposure TechniqueImages like this could have been created in a dark room which Would have been a lot more difficult than the modern techniques that are available The procedure would have involved taking the two images and superimposing them On light sensitive paper to combine the two images into one.

they may have taken one image and developed it with half of the paper covered up, Then covered up the other half and added the other image to it giving the effect Of it only being one image This style that his early work was created with was the reason I listed him as a historical traditional photographer.

Some of his more up to date work is done to give a very similar outcome however in a much more complex way for instance this image to the right shows a tree turning into hands holding onto a nest. This image will likely have been created in Photoshop as it is much more modern and would have been a lot easier to create than in a dark room due to Photoshop's massive options with blending, colour levels and saturation editing.

As you can see from the image in the centre below you can use multiple exposures to create movement. The image shows two fencers moving towards each other from the start point to the meeting point of their swords. This is another use of multiple exposure and shows that it has numerous different possibilities as opposed to being limited to only one.