An image created by me (left), and an image of my late mother Sharon (right), most likely taken by my grandfather Gordon, photo pairing by Adriana Bianchi.

Starting a new project

November 07, 2024

In 2019 my mother passed away, we did not have a good relationship, no condolences needed. I wasn’t interested in keeping much of the stuff in her house, but thankfully my stepmother talked me into keeping all the boxes of film and stacks of photo albums dating back to early 20th century farmers. Thank goodness for her, in more ways than just that.

Here begins a digitization of those photos.

*(2024)* I created this image by capturing the light on the building right after a storm, and adding the figure with images I took in college.

*(1961)* An instant 6x6 peel apart film of my mother as a teenager in Missouri.

Try Anything Once

December 11, 2016 in gallery

This was a project I did in school when I was pretty into shooting fashion photography. I shot it using a Holga and Diana camera, paired with speedlights that I triggered remotely from the hotshoe. I used a digital camera for metering, matching my settings to the toy cameras, so I could get a sense of what the lighting was doing. I'd actually wanted to use instant film, but didn't have a proper back at the time. My assistant held the flash off camera and I was able to shoot away like I normally would.

I still feel like this shoot was one of my most successful, from the work I did in school, it was the most uniquely me. I'd been playing with toy cameras for some time at that point and had been developing some of my theories about lomography, and what I believe plastic cameras are capable of. You could say this was my experiment for prove my hypothesis that toy cameras are real cameras too.

Featured

I was on a podcast!

December 06, 2016 in announcements

Have a listen to me rambling with Graeme and Ade about film photography and have some funny realizations about wildlife and double exposures.

S unny 16 Podcast Eps 26

35mm Pinhole TLR

December 03, 2016

Some of you might be know about this 35mm TLR Kit. Well for that price I had to give it try.

Inside the box you find pieces that took me back to the days of building model cars, and knew I had a decent amount of work ahead of me.

The Lego-esq directions were pretty clear, and everything was going well until I got to the part of building the shutter assembly. There was a little, quite strong spring that needed to afixed to the shutter mechanism. This didn't seem too bad until, *PEW* I launched it across my room to be lost forever! After searching for a couple minutes, I knew it would never be found, and defeated, shelved the project.

A while later I was telling my sob story to a friend and she mentioned she had the same kit, untouched, and offered it to me to replace the spring. Yes! A second chance. This time I wasn't going to let that spring get away from me.

So I prepped the workspace to try and catch any fly aways and tried my darndest to get that lil guy in its place. *PEW* it flew away again, this time I was able to find it again. Alright one more try. *PEW* G(&*#(*&@#$ IT! The second time I actually found it in a spider web behind my computer. At this rate I felt doomed to lose the spring again and have one tiny piece missing from two kits.

So I decided to cut my loses and take a different route. What kind of camera doesn't need some fancy "spring powered" shutter? That's right, a pinhole! High tech tape shutter here I come.

I used some of foil tape, like this(very useful to have around for photography as it's pretty guaranteed to be light tight), and made myself a hole with a pin. With some debate I concluded to still use the front element of lens and place the pinhole right behind it(I should probably do some testing to see if this is really the best way to go).

I had an old expired roll of Agfa APX 25 that I'd never found a good reason to use, so I figured it'd make a nice test roll for this contraption. The camera has a tripod mount so I used that to attach it to a clamp and gave it a go. Here are the results.

I did some shots of my room and then took it into the office, I was really looking to capture some stationary objects and also some motion. Using a pinhole inside, in dimly lit places with expired 25 iso film, I pretty much just clamped the camera places and left it for a couple hours. I know, I should have taken notes on what my exposures were, but I'll do that next time ;).

Something I realized when looking back at the images was that some of the spots I'd set the camera up on where at a weird high angle(there's a lot of exposed pipes in the office) and they reminded me of security cameras, a weird long exposure securty camera. I'd like to expand on this idea as I had a short lived project about watching unlocked security cameras I found on the internet. (@portalwatching) I just need to pick up so super low ISO before that isn't a thing anymore.

I nearly passed right by it

November 26, 2016 in tips

This is an image that I nearly missed. I was scanning old film from a road trip in Southern California from a few years back when I came across a slough of images from the Altamont Pass Wind Farm. It seems I'd shot most of a roll out the window as we drove by, I still get excited about windmills. Most of them were what you'd expect, crap, not very interesting lighting, terrible angles, cars in the way, or just boring image, but I was following my rule of scanning every frame. As I was looking through the images, and I kind of felt like I was wasting my time I noticed this one:

Clone

Soft Light

Curves Screen

Curves Blades

Black and White

Step one was to get rid of the power lines and any dust, using content aware fill and the healing brush respectively.

Then I used a blank layer set to Soft Light and painted at a very low opacity(5%-11%) with white to bring back detail in the shadows.

I opened up the foreground more using a Curves layer set to Screen that's masking out the background. This is an interesting technique, you don't actually change the curves layer, just the blending mode and then adjust the opacity. I also darkened the sky a bit and lightened the whole scene just a little.

Probably the most important thing I did with this image was brightening up the blades at the end, it really makes them pop from the background and the entire image, without the contrast there this image really doesn't work.

Lastly, using a Black and White adjustment layer I used the blues in the image to brighten everything up and really bring out the three planes in this image.

Here's a before and after. Something that I love about working with film is you can often find detail in shadows that would never be there in digital. Even with a RAW image those shadows would have looked like noisy garbage, but with all the work I did here the grain that comes through is just lovely. Hope this shows how you can pull a really great image out of a seemingly worthless scan.

First!

November 26, 2016

Hi,

My name's Spensr, and I'm a professional retoucher who loves shooting film and toy cameras. I'm going to use this blog to share work and show how retouching can and should be used with an analog to digital workflow.

I hope it goes well.

enjoy!