April Image of the Month

 There's something special about this month's image.

It wasn't a big month in terms of number or quality of photos. I took more photos yesterday (at the RnR Get Shit Done race, if you're curious) than I did during the entire month of April. But the number of photos taken isn't a particularly important metric. It's the quality of the photos. I'd rather make one stunningly brilliant photo in a month than one hundred mediocre ones. I'm working on that.

Photographers who start shooting on film after being in the digital world often say it makes them slow down and think about the photos more. Which one could do while carrying a digital camera, but it's difficult. The mode of thought is generally, when in doubt take the photo. Try different settings. Try different compositions. Try anything. At its worst photographers call this approach "spray and pray." Done more selectively it's called, "insurance."

When the goal is to produce better photos, one has think, "what in this scene would make a good photo?" There are any number of factors that go into making a good photograph, and we argue about it. But when there is an identifiable cost for every click of the shutter, even if it isn't much, we try to get it right the first time. We think about composition, camera settings, and many other factors.

The other thing that happens is to decide that there isn't a good photograph in that scene after all. Or at least with the equipment in hand in this light. It might be a limitation on the photographer's imagination or a lack of skill, but the result is to move on. There can be much rueful gnashing of teeth when that photographer sees a great photograph that another person got from that scene.

The big event in April was trying out film to do portraits. Mostly the goal was to better understand the camera, and work on seeing people in a setting, and starting to figure out indoor lighting. If you missed it, you can see the results here. But there was one indoor photo that didn't show up in the results. Michelle had flopped onto the sofa on the way to doing something else, but I loved the pose, and asked her to hold it. I played with lighting a bit, and took a film and digital image.

First version I saw is of course, digital. I liked the image instantly. There's minimal editing, but as I look at it again, I think I'd edit things slightly differently. 

First attempt at editing the film version. Lots and lots of editing. As it turns out, the film was a bit over exposed, and the first attempt at digitizing didn't turn out well till I dropped it into B&W, although it's still not quite how I thought it would turn out. I could have brought B&W film and tried that, but didn't.

Second attempt at editing film and Image of the Month.

The difference is that I reshot the negative with slightly different settings, and used a different scanner emulation in the negative inversion step. This seemed to treat her skin tones better, and is more how I wanted the image to appear.