Photo Exploration | Wallpaper: Pinhole and Marcos
This week has taken a little longer to publish, but it has taken more time to put together a mixed Wallpaper and Exploration post.
I have recently become mildly obsessed with pinhole photography, perhaps wanting to have a bridge from the low-fi reproduction with the technical know-how to create viable pinhole works. That said, I don’t always succeed in my own efforts. It is important to remember when shooting film what film you actually have in the camera. Otherwise you end up shooting Superia X-Tra 400 speed film at 1600, thinking you can just develop it yourself at 1600. But then you open the camera back and whoops — it’s color, and getting a lab to push C-41 is a bit of a pain. So what you get instead is just 2 full stops of underexposed images on film stock that really doesn’t tolerate underexposure in the best of circumstances. Throw in the pinhole lens and we’ve got a mess.
All that said, with the right expectations, a black and white conversion, patience in processing and a little luck, you can still get a workable image. Or at least, the kind of a workable image that can be part of a final product.
So that’s how we got the base layer.
Regarding the trees, there was a really foggy morning last week. I woke up, grabbed a digital camera (5dmk2 with 24-70mm) and ran outside to get some of the trees before the fog started to burn away. That’s a key thing I’ve learned about fog — if it looks good, photograph then and there. Don’t wait — the sun will rise and the vapors will lift remarkably quickly. It’s the morning version of the silver hour at twilight — gone before you notice.
I didn’t have much of a plan for the photos, but I desperately wanted to document the images. Once I opened up the files I thought, “hey — not bad — maybe…wait.…maybe they could be.…yes!”
I generally am not keen on layering, and even less combining digital and film, but for this image I could not resist.
So, to get this image I loaded the pinhole in Photoshop and took the trees as a second layer. By using the Color Dodge blend, I could keep enough detail of both layers. Other reasonable results were found using the Linear Dodge and Overlay modes, but the Color Dodge was best from what I could get. I left a large amount of the residual muck from scanning intact. My scanner was pretty dirty and I didn’t notice until after I had scanned a few images, but I liked the look and left it there.
All told, I don’t know what this image is saying. I like the light, the figure with the hat, the trees and all of it put together. Sometimes something that works for me just works for me and that’s that. Prescribing a meaning to it isn’t necessary. That said, if you have an interpretation please share it with me!