About cameras and taking photos
I was wrong. Turns out Virgin America doesn’t need a darkroom onboard for me to post film photos from the air—if they were taken on a previous flight! I’m presently headed to New York for business, but these were shot a few weeks ago en route to Indiana for my grandmother’s 90th birthday celebration.
There are some things I see in black and white that I’m oblivious to in color. I suppose that’s the whole point of this exercise. We’re so accustomed to seeing power lines cut across our fields of vision that the mind subconsciously photoshops them out. In a world of color, these thin black filaments are simply noise. But in a world of black and white, they’re all signal.
I noticed them in my first few analog photos, and found myself more enamored with the patterns and form of the lines than with whatever had been my erstwhile intended subject. Rather than avoid them, I’ve been explicitly seeking them out in my last few rolls of film. I had no idea how tangled the streets of San Francisco were with power lines (and their brethren: telephone and cable tv lines). Here’s a taste.
I thought this would serve as a nice counterpart to my first and second inflight blog posts. However, until Virgin America provides both a darkroom and a negative scanner (in addition to wifi) on all their flights, I won’t be posting these from the air anytime soon.
As an aside, this shot is from the first roll of film (#5) I’ve had developed since the camera and lens were CLA’d by Youxin Ye.
In other words, delayed gratification photography is back!
In the middle of my 3rd roll of film, I noticed a strange aberration showing up among my exposures. Occasionally, the left third of the frame was coming back badly overexposed.
In my past experiments with color-accenting, I started with a color digital photograph and desaturated the background. Given my recent entree into delayed gratification photography, I now have the opportunity to work in the opposite direction: selectively tinting a black and white photo with color. I realize it’s a cheesy gimmick historically reserved for red lips and roses, but it’s one I’ve found particularly compelling for cars and mailboxes.
