Nature\skin - First tests

Written by Peter Weilnböck

Published on: 2025-07-19

I start to dip my toes into the world of double exposures with the help of my wonderful wife.

As I dabble in using Pixelfed I stumbled upon a user called “Ben F.” or “@Sammael99@imaginair.es” (unfortunately his server went down not so long after I discovered his work). He posted some interesting pictures of people overlayed with natural textures. And since those images looked so intriguing, I decided that I wanted to try to create something similar as well.

There were 3 main styles:

• Textures such as stones, leaves or complete upside down trees overlaid onto the skin of a model, the surrounding of the model completely white
  
• Treetops etc. photographed sideways overlaid with side portraits to cut off the back of the model.
  
• Leaves on a white background, with the portrait inside the leaf.
  
  

I was more drawn to the first 2 options, with a preference to the first, and so those are what I focused on. The third one I completely ignored for now, maybe to try out at some point in the future.
I also, of course, wanted to achieve the effect entirely in camera, with only the scanning options such as white point and adjusting the exposure curves options to manipulate the image. (And of course cropping, if necessary)

Lucky for me, my wonderful wife agreed to model for this project. Since she is a great photographer herself, she thought that some experience on the other side of the lens might be valuable for her as well.

And so we did our first test in the middle of May. As a first test I shot with my trusty Pentax ME and, to have enough exposure leeway, with Ilford HP5 Plus at ISO 400.

First shoot with Pentax ME:

While I do like some of the images, over all the burning out of the backdrop to complete white did not work as well as I had hoped. I did use a white backdrop and pointed the lights mostly towards the backdrop and only let the spill fall onto my model, but this seemed to be not entirely enough:




Even though the treetop images where shot with the leaves against the bright sky, the contrast was not high enough to burn out the dark hair completely in the sky area:


Still, the results did encourage me to tweak a bit and try again. Especially since my wife took to a digital workflow and removed the background on some of the images she liked. And the results were quite respectable. Since I did not use the automatic exposure for the studio shots in any case, I decided that this would also be a nice opportunity to use the Ikoflex.

Second shoot with Ikoflex iia:

Here the results were already noticeably closer to what I had envisioned. And trying to match the poses to the structures photographed earlier also proofed to be a rather fun challenge.




While the next image did not work as I had hoped, I do quite like the result:
This time I had only tried a single treetop image, but I got quite lucky with it. I really like how the one maple leave frames the eye:


After those 2 shoots, I continue to be fascinated with the effect, and so those will not remain the the only photos where I try to overlay textures from nature over human skin. I even think that this might become my first larger photography project: Nature\Skin.