Here are some artworks made by merging two styles of photographs from the same streets. Underneath each one are the source photos I blended together to create them.
With my street photography I usually try to get close to people and be able to see their faces. Combining this with the subjects not being aware that I am taking their photograph so their expressions are natural sometimes requires a bit of trickery but smartphones are good for this. A good tip I learnt years ago is whatever camera you are using keep it up high even when you are not taking a photo. In this way taking a picture requires minimal movement compared to bringing the camera up to your face from waist-level and therefore people are less likely to notice and react by looking at the camera or changing expression.
The images here are all based on evening streetfood stalls from the town of Petchaburi in Thailand where I live.
The urban decay photos that I have combined them with are a different kind of photography requiring a different eye. These weathered urban surfaces are all around us but are typically ignored as a sign of decline but look closely and separate them from what they represent then the colours and patterns can be wonderful or at least fascinating.
The trick is make the blending believable, so that the street scene and the grunge look like they belong together. In this sense some of these are better than others! There are lots of possible ways to merge them and I can't always remember how I did it to the extent that I would probably struggle to exactly reproduce any of these.
The first step is usually to try to find a grunge photo that doesn't totally cover the faces in the street picture.
I see these images as just another way of exploring our fascinating streets and do not see anything more profound than their aesthetics.
Paint flaking off an old car and a stall selling rice soup (plus a range of savoury dishes to go with it). A simple use of the technique which to my eye makes it look like a peeling old photograph.
I used two grunge photos to blend with this woman serving noodle soup: one of another car with disintegrating paintwork and a second of a battered plastic trash bin (with a shift of its colour).
My favourite image of this set. I love the subtle balance between the man cooking padthai and the beautiful cracking pattern. Again, I used two grunge photos here with the second less obvious one nicely filling more of the background.
A wider view from across the street here. The scratchy, rusty grunge fits well with the metal bars across the shop-fronts but I was a little disappointed that I managed to lose most of the motorbike shadows which I thought would be a significant part of the final image. Oh, well, can't have everything!
I used the same grunge photo for this image where it has now become impossible to see what the stall is all about - very small pancake-like sweets that I don't particularly like so don't mind hiding!
For some reason I enjoyed splashing blue all over these oranges. The blue-and-white grunge is from worn labels on a large cool-box.
Generally, colour works better for me with this technique, partly because it is often a big part of the urban decay photos but for this one I preferred the black-and-white version that relies on the texture of that fantastic cracked paintwork (of yet another different car).
