How To: Take a Crazy Self-Portrait of You Holding Yourself

David Talley, a 19-year-old fine art photographer, has been widely praised for his surreal self-portraits. Many of them take hours to set up and shoot, and even more time to post-process through Photoshop or any other photo editing program.

Well, now you can amaze (and confuse) your friends with your own crazy image—David has created a detailed step-by-step tutorial for one of his more popular photographs, which shows him holding himself up.

To make this image possible, you'll need three separate images: an original pose of you pretending to hold yourself, one of you holding a friend (who has to wear the same shirt as you), and then a third one of your friend holding you.

All of the images have to be positioned exactly the same inside the frame in order for it to work.

David cut out the image of himself being held in the third photo, integrated it with the pant shadows of the second one, and finally manipulated that onto the original.

The rest of the project is lots of small editing features such as erasing edges, fixing shadows and messing with the opacity. This might be time consuming, but the end result comes out beautifully and is well worth the time.

Check out David's tutorial over on PetaPixel for more details on how to create your own.