Building an onion

I recall a story I read once about a disgruntled court artist who created a portrait of the king that looked fine on the surface, but made everyone uneasy for some reason. Turned out he had created it through a process of compiling many layers, more than a few of which showed the king in some embarrassing position or with an unflattering expression.

I recalled this story this morning when trying a new photographic technique, called the Orton effect. It does something similar, building a finished image from disparate parts. In this case, several layers of the same image that are exposed differently, or with differences in focus. This image is my first attempt, and I'm fairly pleased with the results.

Traditionally, this was done with two different film exposures. Today, of course, I'm using Photoshop to Ortonize things.