Saturday, July 3, 2010

Daily Practice 184/365

Title: "Paper Lily"
(click image to view larger)
  
I don't usually like to talk much about the process I use for making images, because I personally think these details detract from the message I hope to convey with any image. However, today was a day of experimenting with mixing digital and traditional photographic processes. I have been wanting to experiment with making silver gelatin prints by contact printing from digital paper negatives for some time now. I tried once before with some promising results, which prompted me to make a more serious effort today. I started by making a couple of digital negatives from Holga images I'd made a couple of years ago and I was happy with the gritty results of going from a scan of a cross-processed slide film to digital negative to darkroom print - there's definitely something worth pursuing there, I really like the degradation of the image that results. It occurred to me at that point that I could make a real print for today's daily practice, and off I went to the back yard with my digital camera to make a few images. I converted two into digital paper negatives, and made darkroom prints of them including the one above. The printed image doesn't seem very degraded, unless you compare it to the digital original. What I like is the freedom this new process gives me to explore a broader range of tone, line, mood and emotion from both film and digital images.

1 comment:

J. M. Golding said...

It's as if it's glowing out of a time long past, or maybe out of somewhere deep within.