In the words of Monty Python, "And now, for something completely different."
Some of you may know that in addition to traditional color digital photography, I shoot black and white film, sometimes using different color filters, in small, medium, and large formats. Small formats includes the 35mm single lens reflex cameras in widespread use in the late 60s - 90s. Medium format includes the twin-lens reflex cameras many folks used from the 30s - 60s, which I love. Maybe you remember them, they had two lenses stacked on top of each other, and you could hold them down by your waist to look through the viewfinder to focus. They can take stunningly crisp pictures, because the negatives are so large. The large format cameras I use were in widespread use in the late 1890s through the 1970s. My oldest one, made in 1898, is a giant view camera (wooden box) with a long folded bellows that extends the lens as far as 3 feet out in front of the camera, and I have to cover the back of the camera and my head with a black cloth to focus on a large pane of glass viewed from the rear.
And for the past year, I have been taking workshops at the Center for Alternative Photography in New York City, to learn how to replicate some of the earliest types of photographs ever made, from the 1850s - 1890s, including tintypes, ferrotypes, kallitypes, salted paper, carbon prints, and other techniques that would seem arcane and exotic (and sometimes dangerous) today, but were commonplace and the state-of-the-art in their day.
All of the above is referred to as "wet process" photography, because it requires the use of a dark room full of chemicals, a large sink full of developing trays, and equipment such as rinsers, enlargers, special lights, and more than anything else: time! But there are shortcuts that can be taken to speed everything up with digital technology and get interesting results. This can be done if you have photo editing software that can turn a color image into black and white, and replicate the effect of different chemical toning baths, or different color filters that were could be screwed onto the end of a film camera lens. And that is what I've done here, just for kicks.
You may like these, you may frown at a few of them, you may even shrug and say, why do that? I do it because the human eye is limited in its ability to see the full color spectrum. What we think is a "true" or "accurate" or "realistic" visual image is actually just a slice of the light spectrum that the human eye is capable seeing, and that the brain interprets in its own way. Sometimes the spectrum we do detect hides or masks things we can't discern very well with the naked eye. In my opinion, even simple black and white photography, not to mention the use of different color filters, allow me to see images from the garden differently - but no less faithfully - because there is no "one truth" when it comes to color, light and shadow. And that, after all, is what photography is all about.
So enough words. Here are the pictures...
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
