Orton Sandwich

Michael Orton created a new jonre of photography imitating paintings. He noticed that the landscape painters that he worked with would created a ink and charcoal sketch of their painting and then color them with water colors. He imitated this with photo-film by first taking an over-exposed image (this removes colors and is a washed image apart from the very solid shadows. The art would be to overexpose enough to retain the outline of your subject. In the second shot he would defocus the subject thus smuding color. By mixing the two he would get a watercolor type effect to his photographs.

Digital photography, makes us loose some of the art. Digital Orton is done mostly with a Photoshop action to a single shot by creating a duplicate layer. For the first layer the exposure is manipulated and for the second blur filters do the trick. I am not a fan of this technique as the photos come out to be too perfect, very bright and nothing like the painting effect. I tried to create an Orton using the original style (two images) and blending them in photoshop. I am still to perfect the photoshop blending. When you defocus the subject image naturally zooms in a bit. This causes a mismatch in the edges. It requires a lot of patience in correcting this in Photoshop. Micheal Orton used a zoom lens and would change the zoom to compensate for the image expansion. I am still to master this.


I attempted to shoot a building as well. Now an architectural subject requires sharp lines, so I was set-up for failure. But this being the first attempt I thought I should give it a shot. The second image does have sharp lines and the colors smudge like water paint. Leave behind your thought on this.

Orton Image - Blurred image overwhelms here

If you wonder what the actual building looks like for the picture below here is a link Original Building Image

Orton image created using the Original Orton Technique