Quick and Dirty

I'd spent hours writing a posting and laying out my shots from my first photo shoot in March with the junk store film cameras, but lost it.  Rather than trying to recreate the monster (perhaps it was a sign), I'll simply tuck them in unceremoniously here, and let the comments I tucked into each speak for themselves.

I've since received the shots I took in Chicago, and love them, but will post those separately.  I've written a bit more below these shots about some of the filters I used, and why I love B's so much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I took this on. I was thrilled when I unearthed the film scanner that I forgot I even had, and was able to load my negatives straight into it. Still, I had no idea exactly what B. was going through each time he told me he was scanning a batch of 5 more pictures. I'm thinking "scan ... slap it down, press the button, it's done". Em ... no. The film scanner is meant to process the negatives properly, doing a high resolution pass and enlarging the capture to the size of a proper print. Each strip of negatives took a very long time, and inspite of lining them up perfectly (so I thought) they seemed to come out askew in the final file.

With a little prodding from B., I brought a handful of my first pictures inworld and showed him the results. As I said in my previous posting, I was really rather disappointed with what I managed to capture on film. They were rather unremarkable, and I had a bit of an aha moment when I realized that I was holding things at arm's length and really not entering the space of what I was trying to capture. Still, when B. looked at them, he saw something quite different, and in a matter of moments he was applying his Holga filter and a few others, to dramatic effect. I couldn't believe how much more alive and vital the pics looked with even the tiniest bit of tweaking, and I got excited about looking at them again with new eyes.

The next morning I reloaded my filters into Paint Shop Pro (a package that I've comfortably used for years) and reacquainted myself with the hundreds of possible effects I had at my fingertips again. I didn't want to get into heavy retouching, but rather looked to see if I could get a bit of vignetting and soften things up, make them grainer and a bit more retro, as B. had with his filters. I spent hours just playing, and I loved it. It felt like poetry touching each picture and finding it's soul, and I couldn't wait to get back the set I shot in Chicago Easter weekend.

I've gone ahead and uploaded just a handful of the original batch I took, along with some of the mods that B. did on them, and that I then did myself. This is a learning experience, and a really fun one, and I can't wait to get out and shoot again.

I know to some people it may seem terribly morbid to have spent so much time shooting in a graveyard, but it was a fascinating place to be still and simply look around and take things in. There's great drama, lots of stories, rich history and a sense of heightened presence as you wander along the winding paths through plots that are sometimes hundreds of years old.

Some of these pictures are B's mods of my originals. Very ethereal and almost romantic with the way they are dilated and softened. He gets some brilliant effects with the filters he applies. They have the capacity to turn an ordinary piece into something quite moody and immersive, and this is definitely the case with this picture.

I tend to be drawn to very old, retro photography, and like to experiment with a combination of sepia, noise and shadow filters. I love playing with light, and I am always seduced by a waterstained photo pulling me back into some lost time.

One of the sites that I've found to be invaluable the past few year's is Harald Heim's "The Plugin Site". There are literally hundreds of free filters and effects that you can download for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and other standard graphics editors. Take a peek here at some of the ones you can pic up to try yourself:

http://thepluginsite.com/resources/freeff.htm

There are a handful that I draw on consistently, including Toadie's, Greg's Output Factory, the Ornamente filters, Harry's filters, and the VM toolkits. At the moment, it's a case of overkill. I'm in the honeymoon phase again, the way a kindergarten kid is when he's given his first box of crayons, but that's the point of an experimental project, right? To play and push the envelop and just have fun is an intrinsically cool way to learn.

B, you'll never know how grateful I am for the fact that you put these back in my hands again and have opened a door into something I have both missed very much, and love reclaiming again.

 

~mwah~

Me.