I was looking through my old computer for a file (which I didn’t find) and I came across this scan of a neg from a commitment ceremony I shot a few years back. I don’t have the negs any more so this is all I have of it. I hope they’re doing well.
It made me smile.
Sometimes you shoot something with a digital camera and look at the display and think, “Nope, but I’ll keep it anyway.” It’s a luxury film doesn’t give. This was one of those shots.
It looked blown out and I dialed the exposure back a little — I’d been thinking of this when I was doing it — and kept on shooting. It wasn’t until I uploaded the images to my hard drive to look at them that I realized that I really dug the shot. I toned it a little in Lightroom and cropped it some before I put it here.
It’s funny how that happens.
*shrug*
The flash was supposed to fire but I’d forgotten to turn it on. The result was this image. I almost deleted it from the camera but figured it’d be a good choice to blog. There’s a sort of teachable moment in this image for me because it’s a such a huge reminder of how many things I need to think about while I’m shooting.
I’m diggin’ back through the archives until I get some new stuff to put up and I thought these might be a nice pair.
The first is from a wedding I shot (pro bono for a friend, as the assistant). The bride’s mother had made her gown and it was amazing. Really, the photo doesn’t do it justice. It shimmered in ways that I could never capture on film. I did the best I could, but cross processed film is persnickety. Her tattoo was amazing in the middle of this dress.
The second was this girl, although I never shot this as a part of the series she asked for. It’s the serenity prayer, which is kind of a cool thing to have with you at all times.
I’m giving some thought to purging my archives over at Flickr.
When I started using my digital camera, I kinda put stuff up there willy-nilly, not really caring whether it was representative of my best or even my favorite work. I’ve discovered that now, the only pieces I put up there are ones that get hosted for here and I’m at least kinda picky about what’s there. I only scan some of my film. I cull the digital stuff a lot and weed out a lot of stuff I don’t like.
I suppose that in the end, all I’ll need is some extra time and some desire. I’ll let you know how it goes.
These two are the famous Amber Gangi and her cohort, Candace Nirvana, killer models each in her own right. They were hanging around, waiting for some direction from Jim so I got ’em to do this. The more I look at it, the more I wish (a) I’d had the fisheye then and (b) that I should crop this to a square. In either case, here’s my high art fashion photo.
It took about an hour of poring over these slides to figure out where I went wrong. The idea is pretty well in place, but the problems are that (a) I haven’t got a fisheye lens, which is SO what this needs and (2) the lighting’s harsher than I’d hoped.
The original idea was to have a dour, older woman sitting in a field being attended to by a younger, impertinent server. The woman would have all of her attention and bad attitude focused at the lens (at the viewer) and the waitron (a real word, I’d point out) would be surly. The tea would be overpoured and overflowing and the woman would have no clue.
The sun refused to stay behind the clouds — it was behind them right as we started and went back just as we finished — so we were hot as well as lit wrong. The girls I got weren’t old enough to be, y’know, old. This is a sketch. Again. *sigh*
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.
photographic ramblings of thomas scott 