Selfie Collage

I'm not much of a blogger, I think this has been established, but I'll try to post randomly like I do from time to time.  Here's a crop of a self portrait collage I've made using multiple photos, paint, and doodles.

Merry Christmas!

To all who celebrate!  And happy holidays to others whose observations are different than mine.  May it be a happy time of year for everyone.

Since It's Still Summer Outside

Here are some recent scans from the beach.  Seemed summer started late and still lingers on, so likewise, I'm not letting go yet.

Evolution of a face

While making my digital paintings, I will either start painting over a rough scanned sketch, or start from scratch.  If I can't get the face right, I'll turn it upside down, or put it in a monochromatic scale to reduce the distractions that my brain wants to see (which are not there).  It doesn't always work, but when it does, I'm happy.  You can see one such evolution here.  There were, of course, many steps in between each thumbnail I've shown.

Once I get the face finalized, I play with adding background detail/texture, and/or color.

Recent Works in Sepia

 From my Stepchildren Series

 From a new series, The Royals (WIP)

Recent Polaroid scan from this past summer.

First Pinhole Polaroid of the Season

10 second exposure on a lovely summer day by the Hudson River in a little park between Soho and Tribeca in NYC.

Taken with this camera: The Arunas Cigar Box Pinhole with Polaroid back....

Thursday's Screenshot

Work on my 'Stepchildren' series continues.  I start with a scanned sketch, paint in Adobe Photoshop, all on separate layers.  When a file gets to be a certain number of layers, say, 15 or so, I save a flattened version, rename it with a numerical suffix, and continue to the next 15 layers, and so on.  The face and features change a lot during this process.   And as you can see, I often have a few windows open at the same time.  The redhead on the left is the preview in Adobe Bridge of another painting I've done.

Uncovering The Magic

In a recent post, I spoke about scanning the 'duds' - those photos which came out either way too overexposed or underexposed.  I showed examples of an underexposed Polaroid, and my scanning methods used to uncover the magic hidden within.   Today I'll share one which was overexposed, a Type 600 version of Impossible Project's color film (a 'skins' version with animal print frames).  My cameras are sx-70's, so this film will result in an overexposed image.

The original

The original cropped, after adjusting data in the individual color channels.

Yeller

From acid, to butter, to mild vanilla....

Tourists checking out fake goods on Canal Street, NYC

Weeds growing out of a sidewalk against a cement building.

Apparently a crash test dummy has made off with the cab.

A member of my toy collection.  Hitting the sauce again.

Art gallery on the Lower East side of Manhattan.

Beach Pavillion on the New England coast.

Paste up on the old Tennessee Mountain restaurant in Soho.  

It's sadly since become a Crocs store.  :(

Foggy dirt road captured on Redscale film.

Why Scanning Film Is An Endless Task

There's a reason my film scanning is a never-ending process. First, I am always taking pictures, so the rolls of film and stacks of polaroids continue to grow. Second, since the majority of my cameras are low end and quirky, they can cause double exposures, uneven spacing between frames, and, due to unsophisticated or absent focus/aperture controls, too dark/light and/or blurred images. All these lend to far more time necessary in the scanner with each of these types of images as I attempt to find and make a picture.

Generally, if I take a photo with a sophisticated camera (ahem, I have only one, the Pentax 67) then scanning is a breeze. I can do an entire roll of film in a couple of hours; one evening. With the lo-fi cameras, I spend more time first making a 'reality' scan of the image "as is", and then doing multiple variations of the same image through adjustments to each of the color channels in attempts to 'find' a better photo, more detail, or more character and soul. I may also increase or decrease the saturation, or convert it to black and white, and save all these versions for later comparison.

Pictured above is one of my recent scans. It was an image taken last month in a plastic camera with an attached polaroid back. The film was a black and white Polaroid type which expired 9 years ago, and while I should have shot this as a long exposure, because it was very early morning, very cloudy, and I had a dark filter over the lens, I forgot. All this resulted in an underexposed photo with barely any image, as you can see.

It doesn't end there, however.  All's not lost.  There's nothing to lose in trying to pull something out of these types of images when scanning. Sometimes I find my best images this way. Lightening it, manipulating the color channels (I always scan as 24bit color, even if it's black and white) and other adjustments will cause distortions, and exaggeration of the film emulsion's aberrations, and the dust particles, but all that adds to the character.  The following are three of the 5 or so variations I made of the above photo:

End of Summer

Well, I tend to cling to summer for as long as the weather cooperates, but I guess for many, the Labor Day weekend which kicks off today is the last hurrah.  Back from the beach house, ending my official annual summer vacation, I'm adjusting to city life again, and embarking on the love-hate relationship I have with the task of scanning stacks of polaroids and film.  Happy Labor Day for my U.S. readers.

First One on the Beach

... gets to chose their spot.

Boop-Boopee-Doo!

Some time back I doodled a bunch of cutesie 'flapper' looking girls.  If you've seen my Facebook Page, you may have seen this particular pencil sketch.  I'm working on digitally painting a large scan of this sketch with variations in the oval frame and background.  The hair is still rough, as are a lot of the features.   Thought I'd share my progress so far.

Shoreline Abstract

Taken on a very foggy day, at the beach with a cardboard box pinhole camera I made.  Just enough image to get the gist of it.  That 'dot' a bit left of center is a couple walking along the coast.

UPDATE: Not a couple, but a man and his black lab walking along the coast.

Brownie Holiday

This camera is one of the easiest to shoot.  It uses size 127 film, which is less common, but not difficult to find.  There are zero settings, no "cloudy" vs. "sunny", no "near" vs. "far".  Just point at the subject and click.  And every time I use it I make a notation in my mini recorder (which later gets transcribed in my film logs) that it might be broken, because the 'clicker' feels so slow and like it's not 'catching' on anything.  I note this in case after development I can't understand why the film came out blank or blurry.  But each time, I get some decent shots on the roll.  Here are some recent scans.

Scanning Film

When I scan my film, I usually scan several versions of a single frame.  This, for example: original on the left, more neutral in the middle, and b/w on the right.  Taken with a toy plastic Holga TLR camera, using Lomography's RedScale film.