Digital Tomfoolery.

This is not a real photograph.
I mean, it’s real in the sense I used a camera to make it – a film camera, at that – and it’s a real scene, but it is not a Polaroid photograph. It’s a fake. I used an application that you can download online for free (whether you have a Mac or a PC). It’s called The Poladroid Project and it turns jpegs into polaroid-looking photographs. There’s even a flickr group where folks put their experiments up.

While I usually avoid this kind of post-process, I like this one. I think that digital treatments have their place in photography and if used sparingly, they can create some really cool stuff.

For what it’s worth, the unadulterated scan of this negative lives here.

Meow.

These are the top 25 blogs. I’m not sure how they’re calculated but what I thought was interesting was that this one was included in this secondary list. I kinda always thought this image might work for that site. *Shrug.*

I guess you never know.

Bokeh.

One of the local camera stores is liquidating much of its inventory, getting rid of things they’ve had in stock for ages. They put ads on Craigslist to notify folks of what they have and there were a few manual focus Pentax K-mount lenses left so I picked one up for fun.

It turns out, the 28mm lens I scored is faster than any of my other Pentax lenses and is smart enough to allow the camera to control its aperture despite the manual focus.

The reason such things are interesting is called bokeh. It’s the blurring of the elements in a photograph due to the way the lens “sees” because of depth of field (roughly, the combination of focal length and maximum aperture).

Anyway, this image shows that, despite having been shot with a Hasselblad.

One Sometimes Forgets.

How incredibly comforting film can be.
After looking at Alicia J. Rose‘s images for a while, I dug out a roll of 400 ISO film I had and loaded up the camera. I had originally intended to shoot at the Richmond Highland Games and Celtic Festival but my plans were stymied by my daughter who had no desire to go.
A willing colleague of mine stepped in and allowed me to use the roll during lunch one afternoon earlier this week. I didn’t have anything special in mind, but I really liked the feel of this and wanted to see if I could replicate it.
Eventually, this shot should be redone with a bigger influence of cycling in the background, but for the moment it and the icon shot that accompany it are pleasant to me.
I really love film and the instant gratification of digital is sometimes so inviting that I forget how the film feels. It’s nice to get back to my first love.

Reflecting.

Look closely.

The Forest for the Trees.

Rachelle spent a Saturday morning with me down at the river.
I got more than a few that I like, but I figured I’d post this one.

Family.

Isn’t that what it’s all about anyway?
The mom pictured here liked the scans better than the contact sheet I gave her when I shot this series so I went back and pulled a few more. I like this combination and I prefer the border to not having one at all.

It’s funny how cross processed negs on the same roll, shot the same day under the same conditions can look so different. I had to play with the saturation in photoshop to make these come closer to matching. I wonder if printing them (which is how I used to do it) would have been markedly different.

Anyway, here they are:

Speaking from the Past.

My maternal grandfather died shortly before I graduated from college, in 1994. As an interesting side note, I was such a crummy student that he was one of the few people who knew I’d eventually get out. I think it’d tickle him pink (one of his favorite ways of describing things) that I grew up to be a college professor.

My grandfather was a bunch of things in the 79 years he was alive. He’d served in the Army during World War II, he’d been the principal of an elementary school, he’d been on the highly acclaimed Virginia Union basketball team called “The Dream Team,” and he’d been a Mason. The thing that I remember best about him though — not that I remember a lot of the stuff that I mention here — is that he always had his camera around. I’m certain that the first 15 years of my life are well documented through the lightproof boxes he had.

This is what makes this post interesting. Since his death, no one from our family has really been through his photographs. In fact, since my grandmother died a couple of years ago, not many of us have been in the house. On a recent foray, my father found twenty some odd medium format negatives which he gave to me and tasked me with scanning. We looked at them in the kitchen of my folks’ house and speculated on who the people in the images are. I’ve scanned them and I can honestly say I don’t know who any of these people are. I don’t recognize them.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t seem to have really interesting stories, however. I’m planning on printing the lot of the images and giving them back to my mom so that perhaps she can figure out who the people are. Everyone else in her family who might be able to help has died so I’m counting on her.

Anyway, here are a couple.

UPDATE: My mom and dad have had a look and it turns out that the smiling face second from the left is my grandmother! The only pictures of her I’ve seen are when she must’ve been in her 30s. My parents speculate that she was in high school during these. I can hardly wait to get the prints to my mom.