Spirits of Leonard

Negative scan.

Negative scan.
Recursive.

Negative scan.

Picture from a foggy night.

The second that hung in the art building.

From the first round of prints that hung in the art building.

Scattered light through rain.

Pictures from a foggy night.

Reflections on a still pool of water marred by algae.

Empty offices.

Climb.

One of my professor's favorite shots. Currently hanging in the university's art building.

Skywalking again.

Skull in chalk.

Confusion of scale, study in texture.

Signs and portents.

A case study in printing (part 2 of 2): As the previous post suggests, I needed less contrast. Because this is a very dark print, intentionally so, I had to be careful with adjust contrast. I wanted to keep the shadows a rich, deep black, while resolving a lot of the lost detail from areas that were printed too black. So I swapped filters from a #2 (which is your average, default filter) to a #1, which is two grades lower (they move in half-steps). This was a bit of a gamble. If I'd goofed, I'd need to move up to a #1.5, and I'd have just burned a full sheet of printing paper. This stuff is not cheap, around $80 a box. But since this came at the end of my photography class, and I had printed about fifty exhibition-quality photographs, I had a good sense of where I needed to go with filters and exposure. (This is why printing is more art than science, and why sometimes I feel like going into Eckerd's and telling the Kodak monkeys to stop destroying photography.) Anyhow, the blacks are still deep, I've pulled the details out of the encroached shadows, and there isn't any pervasive grays. All in all, a good print. It's actually quite a phenomenon in person--printed on glossy paper, it looks like a wholly different print at 6 feet away than up close.

A case study in printing: The first version, run at 10 seconds, at f/11, with a #2 filter, wound up looking too contrasty (the shadows were too extreme). Because the highlights were nicely separated--because I had gotten all the detail in the light areas that was present in the negative--I could then focus entirely on the shadows. You print highlights by controlling exposure time, and you adjust shadows by controlling contrast--and contrast is measured through filters. So for the final version, I needed to use a filter that would produce less contrast.

I like pictures of graffiti, pictures of stains, pictures of ignored marks, because they seem to me the discarded epitaphs of forgotten people. For some, these marks are the only ones they will ever leave on the world with any permanence.

Like soldiers.

One of the few places where zero really exists.

Skywalking.

Pictures from a foggy night.

Clarity.

Intrusion.

A crack in a windshield on a rainy day.

Ice that looks like a dove.

An altered image of my three-year-old niece, Willow.

A better picture of the whole ordeal: rose petals (2 boxes); engagement ring (1); candles (4); bottle of champagne (1). Greg owes me bigtime for setting this up while he was at dinner with his now-fiance.