A year or so ago Alan Friswell, the bloke who made the CFZ Feegee Mermaid and also the guy responsible for some of the most elegantly macabre bloggo postings, wrote me an email. He had an idea for a new series for the bloggo. Quite simply, he has an enormous collection of macabre, fortean, odd and disturbing magazine and newspaper articles, and he proposed to post them up on the bloggo.
It could be reasonably argued that there are simply too many UFOs about these days. A quick look at YouTube will reveal dozens of seemingly authentic videos featuring what appear to be extraterrestrial craft skimming through the skies of every locale from the Hackney m
arshes to the Great Barrier Reef. The problem is, of course, can any of these images be truly proven as the ‘real’ thing? In an age of CGI ubiquity, you can barely trust your own reflection, for fear that some dastardly and erstwhile Photoshopper hasn’t been in there to tweak your pixels.So in memory of the good old days, when a fake photo had to be done the hard way, here’s an vintage article about UFOs as they used to be. Plus--bumper-bonus time--one of my fake UFOs. Can you figure out how it was done? I can guarantee that no computers or digital FX were employed in its creation.
Well . . . there's always the suspending an object from an extremely thin wire and then photographing it trick (ala Billy Meier). Then there's the attaching an image to a window or glass pane and then photographing it trick. Of course there were other tricks that could be performed in a darkroom involving manipulating photographic negatives.
ReplyDeleteObviously, you projected your thoughts onto the unexposed film, never opening the shutter at all.
ReplyDeletePlease do keep posting old articles. These seem much harder to come by than old books -- mainly because I have no idea where to look.