Tails of two cities

 Here's a little something I made today! This picture took a lot of back and forth to finally get to where I like it. So as a fun bonus I thought I'd run through how I made this picture, because it is a very exciting process! This picture comprises of three different negatives, and to make it I used three different enlargers. To do something like this it is important to know how to line up different images onto one page of photo paper so that they line up in a way that looks good. But even if you know how, sometimes a picture just has to be a pain in the ass...

This is how I line up my different negatives to merge onto one page. I start off by tracing the outline of one negative on the back of a piece of photo paper. The negatives have layer masks which I made earlier so only a zone I wish to expose reaches the paper. I take that tracing and bring it to the next negative, find where it matches up, and so on for each negative. My first tracing is in solid line, any alterations to the layer masks I make later I alter on the tracing with different lines. 

After everything "should" line up, I test each negative to find the correct exposure. After I figure out what times to use with each enlarger, it's time to see if my mindgrapes are strong and if everything worked.

Here is the first attempt. The alley on the left was showing too much dark pavement, so I adjusted the mask for that. Also the clouds relationship to the horizon line didn't make sense so I also adjusted for that.

Next there were still issues with the mask around the girls heads, and things on the left were a bit too shifted down, so I attempted to correct those issues.

I forgot to filter the sky in this one, so thats why it's dark. But that point is moot because the mask over the girls still sucked. 

Here I continued to try to fix the layer masks, but in doing so I started to feel the clouds were overpowering the image, also the exposing zones were starting to overlap, causing that dark vertical.

More layer mask alterations cause more trouble than they're worth, and the sky was still pissing me off so I made a big change as seen in the next:

Here I exposed a lot more of the New York environment, and mixed in some of the sky. I thought it looked a lot better, all that was left was to minimize the white vertical line.

And there you have it, 2 days and you have a picture! Hope you think it's cool!