Sometimes light leaks can do good things…
Taken with a Banner, Diana clone camera.
Rose Window
Holding his head in his hands
I always crave a creative challenge because it often gets the ideas flowing in new ways. This was taken during an impromptu studio session with friends where we suddenly decided to try out a non-photographic set of lights. I love using props in my people photographs to create a point of interest. The idea of using a mirror isn’t an original one but it is something I’ve wanted to experiment with. It worked to great affect in this shot.
The human element
I rarely do this type of shot where I use a person as a compositional element rather than as the focal point of the photo. I think taking more shots like this is just the thing I need to inject new life into my portraiture. Too often I compose my portraits the exact same way and want to change this.
Red vine
An unfortunate, but inevitable, side effect of digital photography is the reduction of film production by companies like Kodak, Fuji and Ilford. There just isn’t as much demand as there once was and so, many films have been discontinued and taken off the market. One such film that I wish was still made is the Fujichrome MS 100/1000. I was given a few expired rolls by Johnny Foto to cross-process and the results were excellent. I really wish this film was still around because I haven’t found anything that compares in term of colour saturation and texture when it comes to cross-processing slide film.
Crumble
Taken in Vancouver’s Chinatown with cross-processed Fujichrome Provia film. This detail is of an old garage that is one of my favorite buildings in this area of the city. I love the way the yellow paint has cracked and is flaking from the walls as the building itself slowly crumbles away.
Lately I’ve been shooting with a new Trash Camera called an Akira that I picked up months ago at Value Village. I really like the look of the results I’ve gotten from it so far, such as the shot above.
Lovely Lillian
Practising portraiture skills can be easy when working with a subject who is very comfortable with themselves. Lillian was one such person I was lucky enough to get in front of my lens. I found a location to photograph her and then spent only about twenty minutes one lunchtime taking one roll of pictures. As we chatted during the shoot I observed her natural movements and had her hold a pose when I caught her in a moment I thought worked well. Often with straight-forward people shooting it’s just a matter of catching the subject being themselves.
Girls who wear glasses
The above portrait is of Mandy Moore, a knitting blogger I met at the Northern Voice blogging conference earlier this year. Her blog is called Yarnageddon.
I really like this picture of her. I think she looks very cute!
Laundry at sunset
Taken with my Holga 120 CFN, using cross-processed expired Fujichrome MS 100/1000. I wish Fuji still manufactured this film because I really liked the results from it.
Birdless wings
It’s a bit morbid to stop and take pictures of the partial remains of a dead bird, but these were just too lovely to resist. I think it was my fascination with wings more than anything that drew me to take this shot, but I also found it interesting that the bone structure was still intact enough to keep the two wings together. And what became of the rest of the body before the remains of it landed on a busy city sidewalk…?
Image fatigue
This morning I found mention in the Utata forum of an article published in the Autralian News on “image fatigue.” The writer, Sebastien Smee, discusses photography’s loss of status as an art form due to oversaturation of imagery and digital manipulation. The following is only an excerpt from the article, and a link to the full text can be found at the end of this entry.
PHOTOGRAPHY as an art form is on the wane. There may be more photographers having their work shown in galleries, books, magazines and on the web than ever, but something inherent in the medium – something people have spent 1 1/2 centuries being beguiled by – is losing its grip on the public imagination.
Photography has finally become just another way of making images. So easy is it to produce these images that our culture has reached saturation point. Just think of all the wedding photos, baby photos, holiday snaps, news photos, fashion shots, forays into art, scientific photos, police records, studio portraits, passport photos and party snaps that come into existence every day of the year, all across the globe.
Very simply, one can’t keep up. There is barely enough time to look more than once at one’s own, supposedly precious photographs, let alone photographs by those who may have something extraordinary to show us.
But the reason for photography’s eclipse as an art form has not just to do with the astonishing superabundance of photographs; it has to do with dramatic recent changes to the medium. Thanks to the digital revolution, there is virtually nothing that can’t be done to a photograph to alter its once unique relationship to reality.
There is much to amaze in what is suddenly possible but the amazement is largely technical. In terms of art, something profound has been lost. People sense it. Art-loving audiences are fast losing interest in the medium.
The full article can be found here.
Although it is an interesting read, and the writer makes some good points, I don’t agree that photography is losing it’s status as an art form. In some ways it never had it. Even as recent as a few years ago I remember hearing this kind of debate in regards to Toronto’s Conact, on whether photography should be taken as art and whether it deserved the focus of a whole festival. Apparently it is and it does, because Contact is celebrating it’s tenth anniversary this year.
I think much of this debate occurs because photography is the one medium (like writing) that anyone can do – even a small child can pick up a camera and take a decent picture. But not all photography should be considered art, just as not every person who picks up a camera is an artist. And as for the lack of “truth” because of digital manipulation, since when has any art been about truth?