While many of my autumn pictures are either focused on splashes of colour, or are black and white texture studies, sometimes I feel the need to explore the space in-between. The image below is one I captured a couple of weeks ago in the Don Valley in Toronto; the paint on the bridge is faded and blotchy, and the taggers have been busy. The image did not work in either full colour or black and white, so I turned the colour down quite a bit, and that captured the mood of gentle decay for me.
One of the photo sites I hang out on is The Analog Photography Users Group (apug.org). This is a group of people who are dedicated to keeping film photography alive in the face of the digital onslaught. It does have its fair share of purists, who refuse to have anything to do with anything digital, including the hybrid workflow (scanning slides/negatives/prints into a computer and then working on the images in PhotoShop or some other image editing application). One can submit hybrid workflow images to the photo gallery on apug.org but they must be “straight prints.” No other digital manipulation is allowed.
The issue that I have is that almost every kind of manipulation one can do in PhotoShop can be done in a traditional darkroom. I created the image below in the late 1970’s, and what is featured here is a straight scan of the 1970’s print. The effects were done with a combination of solarization and bas-relief, on the print itself, in a traditional dark room. If I did the effects digitally, why would that make it any less valid?
The second law of Thermodynamics has to do with entropy, or how systems will go from a higher-ordered state to a state of lower order (more disorganized). Think teenager’s bedroom as the perfect example.
I like the TV show “Life After People” which chronicles just how ephemeral the infrastructure of our civilization would be, without constant upkeep. The image below was taken in Montreal in September, 2009, of peeling graffiti paint. A year and a bit later, I wonder what that section of wall looks like now; continued decay, or a fresh coat of paint trying to forestall the inevitable?
I took this image of the harbour in St. John’s, Newfoundland on Wednesday night. Even with the ISO cranked up, the exposure was half a second, and hand-held; I did not have a monopod, let alone a tripod with me, so I was stuck.
The Vibration Reduction on the D90 got me out of the jam, to an extent; it’s not tack sharp, but close enough that it captured what I was looking for.
I’m writing this at the airport in St. John’s, waiting to head back to Toronto after a brief business trip in Newfoundland. I did have a few minutes for some photography here and there, and my appetite has certainly been whetted to come back to photograph more of this rugged beauty.
These days there are a number of popular iPhone Apps (and Photoshop plug-ins) which render an image as monochrome, except for one spot of colour. Yesterday, while on a solitary photo-walk along the banks of the Don river in Toronto, I captured an image which seems to duplicate this effect; the red leaves and stems jump out from the muted shades of the background, and no post-processing was required to get this effect.
Reality is the best app there is 🙂
Again not too far back into the past this week. This is an image I made in North Rustico, Prince Edward Island back in 2004. The image appeared (to my eyes) rather non-descript in colour, but when I converted it to black and white, I liked it a a lot better. I used my old Canon Digital Rebel, with the 18-55mm kit lens at 18 mm (equivalent to about 24mm for a 35mm camera) to include as much foreground as possible.
… with the Kodachrome photo-walk on Saturday, taking pictures at the Toronto marathon on Sunday morning, then another photo-walk/meet-up in High Park in the afternoon.
It was fun taking pictures of the marathon, and especially of the half-marathon at the finish. Seeing the joy and sense of victory on the faces of otherwise ordinary people who had just accomplished something extraordinary was quite powerful. The image below is one of the pictures that for me captured it best.
My Third Eye 