Clone you!

Hey buddz, wassup? So here goes a very interesting bit of photo manip!

Many of my friends keep asking me "How the hell did you do that!" whenever they see the above image, which essentially has many "Mukuls" doing all sorts of crazy things!
So here goes the recipe that made it. And like all my tuts, its pretty simple you know. I used my lovely little point and shoot Sony H50 for this one.

1) Find a place where you can get an interesting composition, I chose the park. Make sure that the light doesn't constantly vary, find such a place. Well when I did this, i had a little trouble with this part since I was out shooting in the evening , when light fades away fast. Well my mess is your bless! Learn form my blunder here!

2) Set up tripod: Very important, fix your tripod with camera on it of course!! And either set up a timer so that you can go back to the shot and pose, or use a remote control to trigger of the shutter, once you are in your desired pose. Clear? I hope so. I set up a 10 second timer for each of these shots.

3) Click away the pictures: This is the fun bit man! Your composition matters, so get some really cool and interesting shots going! Make sure that the tripod position is not altered one bit, which is why i feel a remote control solution's the best. That way you can trigger off the shutter without even touching the camera!

4) Lets clone : Fire up Photoshop and place each photo in a new layer. Starting from the topmost layer, erase the portion of the layer which hides the character on the layer below it. You should now start seeing a clone! Repeat for all the layers. Tweak the clones further by cleaning them up well. Now your cloned image should be ready. If you have the characters overlap each other, it can get a little tiresome like how it was for me, but it gives your shot much more dynamism!!! Work tediously at the overlapping areas to do as clean a job as possible, so that your image can make any one go - "What? How the hell did you do that!!!???".

Signing off,
Mukul Soman.