 |
| Hannah Parkhouse & Iryngium giganteum 'Miss Willmott's Ghost' |
Miss Willmott's Ghost & Rosemary
My grandmother drummed into me an expression, “Cuando el diablo no tiene nada que hacer con el rabo espanta moscas.” This translates to, “When the devil is bored he swats flies with his tail.”
My experience is that swatting flies in a darkroom or in my oficina facing my scanner and extensive cabinets with negatives, slides and prints, leads to surprisingly wonderful experiments that result in new techniques.
I was bored one summer day in our Kerrisdale home when I wondered what would happen if I put a plant in my enlarger instead of a negative. For at least a month I used whatever plant in my garden that would fit my 6x7cm enlarger. They were a mixture of negative and positive. I have two boxes full of them.
He above may have led me to wonder what would happen if I suspended a rose from my garden over my scanner. That was in 2001 and since then I have amassed over 3000 of what I call scanographs.
In the comfort of my bright, fume free oficina, I have made negative sandwiches (without mayonnaise) that are very nice.
In photography errors can lead to surprising results. An important factor is to figure out how the error was made so as to repeat it.
With my digital camera I was taking photographs of a beautiful cellist, Marina Hasselberg. I tremendously underexposed a few of the shots with my digital Fuji X-E3. When I downloaded the files I found a few completely black rectangles. I was about to trash them when I wondered. The results, with my 20-year-old Photoshop 8 were in my books, spectacular.
Recently I photographed Hannah Parkhouse and I used that technique. I feel that I am a good devil and good, too at swatting flies.
