Creating Composite Imagery - Eddy Maynard (photograher) — Video Production Company based in Bristol

Eddy Maynard’s punk underground style is hard to take your eye off.

We first met the 27-year-old Middlesbrough-based creative in Croatia, where he was creating composite photos at Outlook and Dimensions.

This month he gave us an insight into how he creates these multi-layer images:

Back at the start of 2019, I was feeling super un-inspired and was thinking of ways to feel creative. I thought back to how I felt when I was back in college doing photography, and I really missed having a personal project to work on, rather than a paid job for a client, which doesn’t always give you full creative freedom. I decided to set myself a task so that I felt like I was working towards something and not just stuck in my own head, so I revisited everything I learned about in college, things like experimenting with slow shutter speed, high key and low key photos, painting with light, etc… and applying it to my modern style of work.

I feel like when you work through those modules in an educational setting, you take the basics from those experiments and keep the knowledge, but in my case, I didn’t really use any of it to much artistic effect, as the experiments we did in college were kind of cheesy - writing our names with torches for example.

I was having fun with this project, but nothing really stuck, until week 5 - multiple exposures.

I’ve always loved the look of multiple exposures, but I’d never really tried it in my own work, it was sort of just something I’d seen on Instagram, double tapped, and kept on scrolling. But while looking for inspiration on Instagram for ways I could make this work, I came across the work of Michael Novotny (@hazy_island), and saw his series ‘The Trajectory’ where he added multiple images together of a bird flying, to show its flight path. This immediately got me thinking that instead of just overlaying two photos together and calling it a day, I could add certain elements from images and make a structured composite image. I experimented a little bit, but soon realised that I didn’t really have anything in the archives that I could make work together. So I waited for a job where I had the creative freedom to experiment.

Slam Dunk Festival was coming up which have shot the previous few years and while looking at my past years photos, I was thinking of ways I could improve and immediately thought that this might be the perfect opportunity to experiment properly with composite images. I noticed that in my photos from previous years, I have always shot either the band or the crowd, or occasionally both in one frame, with a big awkward space in the middle of the photo where the photo pit is. I thought it would be really cool to bring both of those elements together and have a half and half photo that more represents the vibe of being amongst it all - hundreds of sweaty people crammed together, a wall of sound, and a high energy band that sometimes feel like they’re on top of you.

The advantage I had at Slam Dunk is that I was doing live edits, so I’d shoot a band, come back to the photo tent and edit some shots, and then I’d be back out 10 minutes later. It really gave me the opportunity to learn quickly, see where I was going wrong and then go back out and improve. I soon realised a few things that helped make the composites work better:

Anderson .Paak at Dimensions Festival by Eddy Maynard

1. It’s vital to leave plenty of negative space in your shots - this is so you have a neutral canvas within the picture so you can add in your second or third shot, and it’s not laying over the top of something intricate in the background, which could make your shot look messy. This worked well with stage lighting as the ‘negative space’ can just be dark areas of the stage, or could be easily achieved by having the band / crowd positioned at the bottom of the shot, which gives you space at the top to add in whatever you like.

2. Match lighting colours - this helps to blend the photo together. Alternatively you can use complimentary colours. The easiest way to do this is by adjusting the colour temperature of your second shot to find something that works well with the original shot (shooting raw comes in super handy here).

3. Shooting textures (a wide angle of a big crowd, slow shutter speed shots of lighting to create light trails, etc.) gives you a nice third shot to add to your composite image - this helps with blending layers together and covering up bits that don’t work too well together.

4. Layer blend modes in Photoshop are your best friend. Experimenting with these is the number one reason why I always feel so inspired when doing these. You never really know how something will look and it’s exciting to find out.

I roughly edit my photos in Lightroom (simple light and colour adjustments, nothing heavy), export as DNG files, make the composite in Photoshop, and then put them back into Lightroom for some overall colour grading and to add grain.

I absolutely love these as an art form as it opens up so many possibilities of what you can do. You can capture an immersive atmosphere and provide multiple views of a scene within one frame, and you can always revisit old photos and make new composites from them, especially in times like the current, when we can’t all be out shooting gigs.

Hopefully these words have inspired you to experiment yourself. Tag me on Instagram in anything you create, it would be awesome to take a look!

Eddy x

You can follow Eddy on Instagram at @eddymaynard.