Film and Alt-Process Photography

[mike]

I have photoshop but was just lazy. I still like to print my negs in a darkroom! But making a layer to mess with the contrast to spot bits n bops is a great tip - thank you

[timp]

I learned the hard way - proudly posted what i thought was a great xpan photo of snow landscape on Flickr & the first comment was ‘its great… apart from the massive hair!’ - sure enough there was a hair the size of a tree that I somehow did not even see! Removed the photo and have been a bit hyper about it ever since

[praffensperger]

In the case of @mike 's photo with dust in the sky, I think the dust adds something really interesting. Probably because I’m used to looking at perfect photos, I just assumed that the dust was intentional and actually part of the scene.

Expensive digital cameras / audio recorders can produce very high levels of fidelity (in the sense of scientifically accurate reproduction) and we can use Photoshop / Pro Tools / whatever to remove any lingering imperfections. Definitely there’s a place for all that!

On the other hand, sometimes more grit, more dust and more distortion can be pleasing in a strange way.

I guess it’s like if you make a mistake when playing a piece of music, it could either be damaging to your career, or jazz.

[mike]

well we are enjoying the imperfections I wanna point out the weird green Halo strangeness in the lower left quadrant. Its the place that I bent the film while using a black bag to load the film for developing. more jazz ?

[praffensperger]

And there’s also the black stripe on the right side. The mountains themselves are imperfect. They are flowing and coming apart and being hauled away by that river.

[scttcmpbll]

Just thought I’d mention that I’m now selling prints of some of my experimental destroyed Polaroids: Photo.Shop — Scott Campbell