Olena - 28 November 2019

Many of my photographer contemporaries like the fact that the digital world has brought with it the certainty that the photograph taken (captured in our contemporary vocabulary) is just fine as the proof comes from looking at the back-of-the-camera display.

In that past century the Polaroid was sort of the same thing. You would take your Polaroid and upon checking it you knew all systems, shutter, flash synchronization, correct exposure, sharpness, were all in order.

But before Polaroid backs for expensive cameras used by advertising or magazine (me) photographers were available, we had what was called the latent image. This was the possibility of an image (and a hoped for useable image) but it first had to be processed by the photographer or a commercial lab. I give thanks to that Great-Photographer-In-The-Sky that I was never told at the professional labs I used for my slide and transparency processing, “Alex there is no charge.” This meant that the lab might have had some problem and the film processed in that particular batch was all ruined.

Amateur photographers were often asked, “Did the pictures turn out?” Nothing was certain.

To me in spite of the stress involved I liked to anticipate what those pictures that I had taken might look like or even better some pleasant surprise caused by an unlikely accident.

I had an unlikely accident in a year past. I wrote about it here and here. A methodical photographer does everything in the same way. It is almost a ritual. This way when something goes wrong that photographer can trace back to locate where the error/accident happened.

My state-of-the-art Fuji X-E3 (perhaps for only a few weeks until a new non-plus-ultra version is launched into the market) can be deliberately forced to take gross underexposures. When this happens I have ways (not complicated) of bringing back some light to a completely black rectangle. The results are not predictable. But sometimes they are surprisingly rewarding as is this one that I took of she-of-the-blue-hair.