As researched earlier, Gustave used a method of combining two negatives of images that allowed Le Gray to achieve tonal balance between sea and sky on a final print. It gives a more truthful sense of how the eye, rather than the camera, perceives nature. I will be taking my own images and pasting them together to reconstruct Gustave’s method. Here is a double page spread from the current topic I am working on making a newspaper.

These images I chose to print out A5 size to reconstruct together with using Gustave’s old method of physically combining different skies and sea horizons together…

Firstly I printed out my 4 chosen images. I chose these images to use as they mostly all have the same levels of whites and darks within the seas and skies. This makes it easier to combined different parts of images together without them looking unnatural.

Next I cut out the skies from the top images and moved them around to fit the right photo. Clearly the two cut outs on the top right would not fit together as they are both two very different exposures.

Using the best two cut outs that went well together, I pasted them together with glue and made the horizon line blend as much as it could to look natural and as if it was an original photo. In my opinion this image relates to Gustave’s method and style the best. The sky has a great moody cloud that softens the brightness from the lower clouds.

With the remaining cut outs I played around until finding another combination that works…

This images would have had a better outcome if photo-shopped on adobe as for the continuous white line around the rocks. Apart from that both exposure levels work well together. The cliffy rocks have been placed in the foreground creating a background being the sea.