Improvements From The Past
Sunday, November 24, 2013
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| Evelyn Hart - 2000 |
In 2000 I was invited to take some snaps backstage at a Vancouver performance called Dancers for Life. I took a particular delight in taking pictures of two of my favourite dancers, Evelyn Hart and Crystal Pite.
Only very recently did I finally acquire a
digital camera. All I had back in 2000 were my Nikons (an F-3 and two FM-2). I
loaded a couple of them with very fast Kodak 3200 ISO film. My results were
dramatic and awfully grainy.
It was more or less at this time that with
an early Epson scanner I discovered (before I could do this simply by working
with an RGB scan) that by scanning the negatives and telling the scanner that
it was a colour negative, I would get a fine red/orange colour. With little
skill the tone of skin could almost be made to resemble skin tone.
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| Evelyn Hart & Rex Harrington |
Even then I decided I did not want to spend
(throw) money dealing with a desk top inkjet printer. I had a couple of the
Evelyn Hart, one with dancer Rex Harrington, pictures done as fine giclées by one of the first labs in town that did
them. I asked the lab to make images that were small. They made them 3 by 4
inches. A year later I photographed a Japanese/Canadian friend with fine grain
film loaded on to a medium format camera, an RB-67 Pro-S. I used a powerful
studio flash for these.
Having investigated
the standards of propriety of medium.com, and firm in my resolve to not show
bits in my personal blog or in my facebook or Twitter links I decided not to
take any chances and place here one of those images without modification. Odri
(how a Japanese person would pronounce the Audrey of Audrey Hepburn) as the
image is called, here, is a censored version.
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| Odri - 2001 |
But important for the
thread of this essay, a thread in which I put forth that in some cases an
improvement is not so I would like those who have gotten this far to examine
the images and note the wonderful (for me!) bits of sprayed ink. This look has
disappeared with the new inkjet machines and the only way to get similar
results would be to resurrect one from that past. The Odri pictures (they were
five in a long frame and each one was very small, almost two by two and a half
inches). You had to get close to discern and admire the bits of ink!
