Aidan Dunbar

The slides for the Pack Your Bags project arrived from Peak Imaging on Friday, and all bar two images not coming out at all - not really sure what happened there - I am happy with the results.

Everything you see in the first image above (bar a bit of tweaking to tidy up the edges and give a bit more colour) is captured on one 5x4 sheet of film.

It was quite a bit of work getting to this point - making the x-rays first, getting them printed to roughly the right size on acetate, and then finally taking the picture.

The final part took most of a day to complete - 9:30 until 4:30 when the Studio Photography students came (along with a small army of assistants, make up artists and models) and kicked me out of the far studio. A huge amount of equipment was used including three lightstands, two Sinar 5x4 cameras, two massive tripods, an A2 lightbox, a few PhotonBeard continuous flourescent light sources, an Elinchrom 400 flash head with a strip softbox and two small plastic yellow chairs of the sort usually found in primary schools.

Was it overkill? Probably, but it did the job nicely. The two cameras allowed the movement of a loaded film back, ground glass and all, from one setup to the next allowing the registration to be almost perfect on the final image.

Lining the two separate images up took the most time - making sure the bottom of the bag was in the same place on the x-ray camera and on the real-bag camera, the lie of the strap was equally curved, the metallic strip across the front fell in the same orientation. I thought I had it nailed, but apparently not. Ever so close, but not quite.

Removing the tell-tale signs of alignment mishap was easy enough, cutting and pasting, then adjusting the tone of the pasted area to match the destination and blending the edges. But whether it is convincing enough is another matter. The curving and editing of the transition between the real bag and the x-ray was necessary I feel to break up the clinical, sterile, staged feel of the original slide.

The final image has come visually quite a way from the original idea (shown in the sketchbook pages), while the original concept has stayed pretty much the same - something vague about things not being quite as they seem at first glance. Will it instantly be dismissed as Photoshop fakery? Probably. Is it as awesome as I first saw it in my head? Probably not. Does that matter? Again, probably not, in the end.

Feedback would be very much appreciated if you can spare a second or two.