A number of people have (privately or publicly) asked me how I achieved the following image in my Last Visit gallery.

"Mirrored", Lawrence Ripsher. Click to enlarge

From conception, to execution, to actually watching the reaction of people as they discover something is “wrong” with the scene, this has been a very fun image for me.

Just in case it really needs spelling out, the disconcerting part of this picture is that the reflection of the girl (in this case, my wife Akuri) should actually be looking away from the camera – but instead, like the model – it’s looking directly at the camera.

A few people guessed this was Photoshop. Other guessed tricks with mirrors. A further superstitious few suggested some darker (cue spooky music).

OK, so in the spirit of sharing and education, I thought I’d provide the answer on here with a step by step explanation of how I ended up with a shot like this. However, choose now if you’d like to continue as like with all magic tricks, learning of the secret is not always as fun as being left in the dark. It is however more useful so, onwards.

So let me first get right to the point – there is no trickery with multiple mirrors. This is a Photoshop job. Now, it’s not just Photoshop – in order to achieve an image like this, you first need the idea. After you have the idea, you need to execute it and that means two images. Now at this point I should also say that I’m actually not actually an expert with Photoshop – I typically describe myself as having better judgment at how / when to process rather than having masterful skills with processing. So this is a rare (for me) case of a composite image. And honestly, if I may be so bold, I’m rather pleased with it.

So, the first image I took was actually to get the reflection. I already knew what I wanted from the portrait part of the image and that it would be the easy part. So the reflection was what I wanted to kick things off… Knowing that the image would need to be roughly divided in half between the subject and her reflection (in order to allow for processing later), I composed the model on the left and asked her to look at me through the mirror. The whites of the eyes were a critical part, accentuated by a sideways long glance. This actually took about 20 images to get exactly right – with me taking more than I actually thought I needed just to give myself a good selection later (as it’s actually quite hard to visualise this kind of thing when you’re at the scene). The first image looks as follows.

"Mirrored – Image 1", Lawrence Ripsher. Click to enlarge

OK now, if you glance up at the original image, things should be coming clearer already.

Next, I needed the actual portrait so I asked the model to direct her gaze at me. This time the reflection of course points away from the camera (as it naturally should). The expression I wanted from this needed to be fairly subtle – too expressive would become cliché as the discovery is meant to come slowly. So “deadpan” was the look I was going for. Surprisingly, this was perfect on the first picture (credit to the beautiful model) and that was the image I used.

"Mirrored – Image 2", Lawrence Ripsher. Click to enlarge

So we have our two pictures… what next?

Now it’s a simple case of careful Photoshop. You clone the reflection from one image to the mirror of the next image. The setup actually allows some mistakes to be made (the mirror is dirty, it’s nicely divided as an image, etc) so it’s not as hard as it sounds. Below is a screenshot of how it’s done:

"The Making of Mirrored", Lawrence Ripsher. Click to enlarge

And that’s it!

To finish up, it just took a bit of cloning, dodging, touching up – and voila, you have an image that slowly creeps up on you and stays a little longer than it comfortably should.