Erik Johansson

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Look at each picture again. What is your favourite detail?



Script 

I'm here to share my photography. Or ____ it photography? Because, of course, this is a photograph that you can't take with your camera.

____, my interest in photography started as I got my first digital camera at the age of 15. It mixed with my earlier passion for drawing, but it was a bit different, because using the camera, the process was in the planning ________. And when you take a photograph with a camera, the process ends when you press the trigger. So to me it felt like photography was more about being at the right place and the right time. I felt like anyone could do that.

_____ I wanted to create something different, something where the process starts when you press the trigger. Photos like this: construction going on along a busy road. But it has an unexpected ______. And despite that, it retains a level of realism. Or photos like these -- both dark and colorful, but all with a common goal of ________ the level of realism. When I say realism, I mean photo-realism. Because, of course, it's not something you can capture ______, but I always want it to look like it could have been captured _______ as a photograph. Photos where you will need a _______ moment to think to figure out the trick. So it's more about capturing an idea than about capturing a moment _____.

But what's the trick that makes it look realistic? Is it something about the details or the colors? Is it something about the light? What creates the illusion? Sometimes the __________ is the illusion. But in the end, it comes _______ to how we interpret the world and how it can be realized on a two-dimensional surface. It's not _____ what is realistic, it's what we think looks realistic _____.

So I think the basics are quite simple. I just see it as a puzzle of reality where you can take different pieces of reality and put it together to create ___________ reality. And let me show you a simple example. Here we have three ______ imaginable physical objects, something we all can relate to living in a three-dimensional world. But combined in a certain way, they can create something that still looks three-dimensional, like it could exist. ______ at the same time, we know it can't. So we trick our brains, because our brain _____ doesn't accept the fact that it doesn't ______ make sense. And I see the same process with combining photographs. It's just _____ about combining different realities.

So the things that make a photograph look realistic, I think it's the things that we don't even think about, the things all around us in our daily lives. But when combining photographs, this is ______ important to __________, because otherwise it just looks wrong ______. So I would like to say that there are three simple rules to follow to achieve a realistic result. As you can see, these images aren't ______ special. But combined, they can create something like this.

So the first rule is that photos combined ________ have the same perspective. ______, photos combined should have the same type of light. And these two images both fulfill these two requirements -- shot at the same height and in the same type of light. The third one is about making it impossible to __________ where the different images begin and end by making it seamless. Make it impossible to say how the image ______ was composed. So _____ matching color, contrast and brightness in the borders between the different images, adding photographic ________ like depth of field, desaturated colors and noise, we erase the borders between the different images and make it look like one single image, _________ the fact that one image can contain hundreds of layers ______.

So here's another example. One might think that this is just an image of a landscape and the lower part is what's manipulated. But this image is _______ entirely composed of photographs from different locations. I _________ think that it's easier to ______ create a place than to find a place, because then you don't need to compromise with the ideas in your head. But it ______ require a lot of planning. And getting this idea during winter, I knew that I had several months to plan it, to find the different locations for the pieces of the puzzle ______. So for example, the fish was captured on a fishing trip. The shores are from a different location. The underwater part was captured in a stone pit. And yeah, I even turned the house on top of the island red to make it look more __________.

So to achieve a realistic result, I think it _______ down to planning. It always starts with a sketch, an idea. Then it's about combining the different photographs. And here every piece is very well planned. And if you do a good job capturing the photos, the result can be _____ beautiful and also quite realistic. So all the tools are out there, and the only thing that _______ us is our imagination.