I always digg'd this creepy boarded up house. It still looks like this I'd imagine, minus the water and wooded background. I think the water came from a sewer stream not to far away, and the background is from a bike trail in Annapolis. What I always liked about my style of photomontaging, which isn't a word, is how imprecise I could be. For this picture I took a dremel to my negatives, beating them up with a lot of RPMs. The open holes for the light to pass through and the opaque layer masks are what cause all of the black and white tears all around the image. There's really no fighting those artifacts they're gonna show up, and I wouldn't anyway because I think it looks cool.
This one, and many of my pictures are comparable to Jerry Uelsmann (b. 1934), famous fella. And thanks to google, I am able to show just how so at no cost to anyone but him!
This untitled picture is from 1982, and features none of the artifacts I can't avoid. But he's got a few decades of practice on me, and my methods are quite different. Our approach to making photo montages is a bit more similar, however. He says that he doesn't go into the darkroom with any sort of final image in mind. Instead he goes in with new and old source material, and as he thinks and imaginates, the final image just comes to be naturally, like a thought or an idea. What we do mentally is less like how I find other photographers think, and more like how abstract painters think. Starting with broad strokes to prepare the ground for more and more specific actions, and what those actions are can't be decided until you start. Eventually you either end up with something cool, or a piece of crap!
http://www.uelsmann.net/