The other day I was talking with friends about photography. Old style, with film and developer and enlargers and all that messy process stuff that once upon a time was part of the alchemy of making photographs. My interest in photography goes back some time, to just after 1968 or so, and by the time I was a sophomore in high school I was into it. As I’ve mentioned before, I thought I would make a career of it. And in a way, I did.
I am delighted with digital. My ability to achieve better photographs with Photoshop surpasses what I could do on my best day in the lab. That includes what I can do with my old negatives. I bought a very good scanner and from time to time I delve into my files—my actual paper files—and play with some of those old images.
They are different. I can’t quite define it, but even when transformed into digital files they exhibit certain qualities that occasionally I miss in purely digital files. But they are a pain to work with, because, as with most things analog, they come with noisy problems that just have to be painstakingly addressed. Dust. Sometimes embedded particles from the processing. Frankly, 90% of these specks would never have shown up in a traditional lab. The optics, the media with which we worked…it was a bit more forgiving. Light seemed to bend around them if they were small enough. But scanned in at a high enough acuity, one finds those negatives mine fields of speckles.
Now, I’ve never been the neatest person, so it was always an issue in my lab work. I learned how to retouch out of necessity. I got good at it. The difference now is how many of the little flecks need to be eradicated.
I’ve gotten to where I use this part of the process to meditate. And truth to tell, a lot of those old negatives offer beauty enough to make the cleaning up more than worthwhile. This one. I’ve been working on it for a while now. I shot is some time in 2004 in New Mexico and it is one I keep coming back to. It’s one of my favorites, although it doesn’t seem to attract much attention from anyone else. But it has everything: symmetry, texture, tonal range, story…
You can see my influences here. I mean, this is the sort of thing one might see in an Edward Weston collection, or Ansel Adams. I’m not comparing the quality of the image, just the subject matter and so forth. I just finished getting rid of the noise. I think for now this is the best I’ll be able to make this one.
(Yes, it’s for sale. Click on it and you’ll be taken to the gallery image. There’s a BUY button in the upper right corner which will take you to the store. Same for the next image.)
We were visiting a friend, who lived in the house behind that window. I shot a number of images that trip that I quite like, but this one never gets old for me. Below, is a detail of a barn that no longer exists. Same kind of appeal for me. Texture, I like the way I framed it, the elements work for my eye.
Once in a while I muse over the might-have-beens had one or two things gone just a bit differently and I had managed to become a professional art photographer (instead of working most of my professional life in a lab). I sometimes think I might have been well-received.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love being a writer. When I was much younger, though, I thought I could do both.
Well, why not? There’s still time.
Anyway, enjoy.