Showing posts with label making lemonade from lemons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label making lemonade from lemons. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

The Surprising Benefits Of Turd Polishing


There were two massive guy lines in this composition that totally marred the otherwise wonderful vista. Which lead me to frame sloppily. What I mean is, my subconscious awareness of the one explains the other. Yeah, and I'm sticking with that story. At any rate, the modern version of Photoshop lets one remove power lines and similar distractions with a couple of mouse clicks. I suppose I could use AI to fix the crop, but that is still somehow beyond the pale for me.

Monday, August 28, 2023

Leaf And Petal


I can still remember the cold winter morning when I developed this roll of film. My morning cup of coffee had not yet kicked in and so I did not dial in the temperature of my developer very precisely. The cold solutions led to technically crappy negatives, but at least there was some silver to work with. I posted the image to Flickr and to my surprise it was featured in Explore and I got more love for that photo than almost any other. One thing I've learned over the years is that you just never know how things will be received.

 

Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Sometimes you get what you pay for :(

A few years ago, I picked up a bulk film roller off of that auction site. I was really excited to start preparing my own custom rolls for daily shooting. In particular, I wanted to be able to make shortie rolls so that I would be more inclined to use my half frame cameras. I love them, but the prospect of having to fire off 72 frames on a single roll is a bit daunting.

To test my system out, I decided to purchase a bulk roll of the absolute cheapest film stock I could find, so I ordered 100 feet of ISO 400 Brand X film. Let's just leave it at that. I shot a roll through one of my cameras and, after developing the roll, was disappointed to see everything was under exposed by just over two stops. Arrgh! It looks like they sent me 100 speed film by mistake, even though the box had a big 400 on it. I was not super thrilled, to say the least. Well, it turns out that one of the images makes a decent abstract composition. Perhaps I can do something with it at some point, like use it as a texture in Photoshop. In the mean time I jacked up the contrast in post production and am thinking about it as an interesting figure/ground study. Yeah, that's it.

None of the other frames on the roll, particularly the portraits, could really be salvaged. Bummer.