Combination printing

For example, the long exposures required at the time to create an image would properly expose the main subject, such as a building, but would completely overexpose the sky.

[2] Combination printing required a lot of careful work to plan out the concept of what the final image was desired to look like.

When a photographer wished to create a combination print, issues of good exposures, scaling the subjects to match up, and consistent lighting were all essentials if they aimed to make it look as realistic as possible.

Starting as early as the mid-19th century, new methods such as the combination printing, began to change the way people looked at different photographic techniques.

Henry Peach Robinson, considered to be another one of the pioneers of combination printing,[6] was not only an artist, but also an author, and wrote many journal articles on photography.

His writings about technique became fairly well known and he was held in high esteem, despite having critics who accused him of misrepresenting the real world and the truth by using the combination printing method.

In one of his pieces, entitled Autumn there is a darker foreground subject with some hazy distance created with trees visible in the far background.

When explaining the print, Robinson discussed that he initially sketched out the scene that he hoped to produce, trying different various samples of what he could do with putting the scenery and figures together.

In more modern times of photography, there exists a theory, presented by Jerry Uelsmann in 1965 to The Society for Photographic Education, called Post-Visualization, that can be connected back to the creation of combination printing.

This allows photographers additional ways to express themselves instead of just following the common belief that photography is a simply mechanical, straightforward process with no creative elements.