April Image of the Month

Often an out of town photo ramble will generate the best photos of the month. The major ramble was down to Nanton with Sean, looking mainly at the Bomber museum. Most of those photos were documentary in nature, typically not what I would think of as best. 

There were some film photos as we wandered around town, and I admit to a bit of a dither here. I'm still working through the process of how to best represent film photos. It's easy to digitize from the negative. You guys have seen many of my images that way and I'm generally pretty pleased with the results. But when I go down the print path, things change a bit. I'm finding it difficult to get a nice photo of a print. 

A bit of a digression that maybe belongs on my photoblog page. Printing from a negative involves a lot of variables that (hopefully) produce a specific print that I'm happy with. No computer required. Digitizing from a negative involves a computer and can produce an image dramatically different than your initial negative might indicate. With a bit (maybe a lot) of work, one could remove all the subtle imperfections that give a film photo it's character. As an aside, I see many photos that are so perfect they look unreal. Don't get me started on AI.

So now imagine working away in the darkroom to produce a beautiful print. Done right, there is a subtle graduation in tones that don't look the same in digital. Typically for me just now, the print is a crop of the original frame which can change the character of the photo. Taking a photo of the print often loses that subtle look, and there's the problem of lighting the print to avoid reflections, shadows, or colour casts. Then once digitized, there's a choice, to try to make it look as much like the print as possible, or to make the digital version as good as possible. My thinking is that if you were going to do that, you'd start with the negative, not the print.

So this leaves me with the thought that a couple of the prints are really nice, and ought to be on the podium for this month. There are now several versions of these prints, and the best ones are just that. Prints. 

And another thing, while I'm at it. My rule for digital images is that the date taken is the date used, regardless of when edited. The date is in the metadata. For film, I was using the date I digitized it, which might be some time after the actual image was captured, depending on travel, developing, and digitizing times. And now printing. That might happen weeks, or even months after the image was taken and developed. After all, one doesn't set up the darkroom to do one print. 

So much as I like several of the film images from that trip, I'm thinking it's not quite fair to try to compare a print to a digital image. For those that live in Calgary, it's easy to see my prints. Invite me to coffee and I'll bring a binder of the best ones. Or if you're the model, you'll get prints. (Yes, M and A, there are prints awaiting our next meetup.)

There were several rambles in Fish Creek that produced nice photos, or what I think of as nice photos, even though lots of other people wouldn't agree. 

The closest rambles, of course, are our lawn and garden. That's becoming interesting again.

As usual, the nearly 2,000 race photos are not in the running. So which gets onto the podium?

2nd Runner Up

Part of a tool tray in the Bomber Museum. This one has gone through a bit of a process for me. I liked it as soon as I saw the tray, and had no hesitation about taking the photo. Then when editing I didn't like it as much, but the more I looked at it as while working on other photos in Lightroom, the more it grew on me. I'm not entirely sure why. 

1st Runner Up

I dithered back and forth between this image and the IotM. I like the image, of course, but it isn't really a photo OF anything in particular. I'm a big fan of reflections, and the light is interesting. If I'd been a more productive photographer, this might have got bumped off the list.

Image of the Month

There was a version of this that appeared earlier but I've tweaked the crop a bit.