Blog — John Dobson Photography

Recently I decided to revisit the creepy twin idea but this time with a girl of a similar age to the Grady Twins in The Shining. I put the word out on Facebook looking for a suitable model and found someone with a younger sister who could stand-in as the other twin. I used the same compositing technique as my first twins shot and shot my model in a studio. I took the backgrounds shots separately at The Grace Hotel, an art deco hotel in the CBD. I shot these with a compact Sony RX100 camera. This allowed me to shoot fairly high-res shots inconspicuously without drawing attention to myself.

When I’m creating an image combining shots I need to visualise the various elements and how they finally appear together. There needs to be unity with all the elements. I need to match the lighting, lens, perspective and camera angle. I used an 800-watt tungsten redhead on a boom arm creating unflattering overhead lighting with dark shadows in the eye sockets and longs shadows under the nose.

Working with various layers in Photoshop I combined the right and left twin images into one then added the background shot behind them in another layer. I used Lens Blur to blur the background to focus attention on my subject, something I didn’t bother doing in my original shot. And I spent some time cleaning up and blurring the edges. When combining images I continually remind myself of Leonardo da Vinci’s sfumato technique of blurring the edges and letting the eyes do the work. Hard sharp edges can draw attention to the post-production when combining shots. I’m trying to move away from the unrealistic over-saturated lurid colour palette I used to be so fond of, so I tweaked some of the colour. And finally I added a Dramatic Grungy filter in Luminar, which has a desaturated bleach bypass look.

Final composite of Bianca standing in the lobby of the Grace Hotel

I’ve always been obsessed with twins, identical twins in particular; I’m a Gemini. I envy the closeness they must share, to enter the world having spent nine months in the womb together. I can’t imagine looking at someone who is a your doppelgänger but who also has a free will of their own. I’ve done a number of shots of fake twins or doubles, all done with multiple exposures.

When I was studying photography we had an assignment to create an image using multiple exposure. I decided to recreate the creepy twins shot from The Shining. Stanley Kubrick’s inspiration for the shot was Diane Arbus’ 1967 Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey photograph. And Diane Arbus may well have been inspired by the work of August Sander such as his photograph of Middle Class Children, 1925.

I like the idea of creating something photographically that doesn’t actually exist. Or creating an illusion where something is masquerading as something else, like Japanese replica food designed to tempt patrons into eating the real thing, the fake generates the same emotional response.

To create my twin shot on the day of the shoot I brought in two red hoodies. (I’m a Gemini; I have two of everything) I used Will, one of my fellow students, wearing one of the red hoodies and had him stand next to another student with shoulders touching, wearing the other red hoodie. I shot my two models in the studio with one light with a small dish reflector, on camera axis at a forty-five degree elevation. I wanted to replicate that artless on-camera flash type lighting used by Diane Arbus. Then I got my two models to swap positions. I shot the hallway they were supposed to be standing in separately because I knew I would have more control of the light that way. Then I created a composite of the two shots of Will and added the hallway background in another layer behind the twins composite.

The colour palette of my original shot was totally different than The Shining scene. Originally my shot, the one above, had a lurid saturated colour palette: bright red hoodies, ginger hair, slightly bluish skin tone, bright acid green walls and yellow floor. I just used the The Grady Twins scene for inspiration and went off on my own tangent with the kind of colour palette I was into at the time. About a decade later however I decided to move closer to my inspiration source and colour graded the shot to match the colour palette of the scene from the film, as in the version below.