Monday, February 09, 2015

Blending Time and Mediums:

Way back when.... there was only film to capture your photographs and movies. Mine was a 35mm camera a single lens reflex using mostly black and white film. And for special occasions color film, but most of my early work was black and white. The most important thing about those times, for those that were not around? There was no deleting your mistakes within the camera!You could not just look at your LCD on the back of your digital camera and see if you liked the photograph you just took, and decide to keep it or as you do today just delete it. You never got to see your mistakes or successes until later after they had been sent away, or you had learned to develop your film and then print an actual photo, from the negative.

What I blended:
the photograph above is a composite of mediums. The (young mans) face in the photograph is me (40 years or more younger), it was taken with a 35 mm film camera. I found the actual photograph in my old photo album and then scanned it and uploaded it digitally as a jpg file to my computer. But its origination is strictly from silver laden 35mm film, and  then developed with chemicals.

My face captures the light of a  moving lit candle, slowly moving in front of my face from left to right.The camera was set for a  time exposure of about thirty seconds. Although the candle can not be seen because it never stayed in one spot long enough for the then probably ASA 200 film to catch its shape. You can see the light trail left by the burning candle as it traveled in front of me. The rocket taking off and the trail of exhaust below it ,and the tower to the right is taken from a U.S.Postage Stamp honoring Robert H.Goddard. He is credited with inventing the first known liquid fueled rockets . I  am a huge fan of the early space program and astronauts and exploration into space, so I blended the digitized file of the stamp with the 40 year old  'selfie'  portrait photograph.

Experiment with mediums: 
There are many old 35mm slides and developed films from the past most likely from your own photo albums, parents or even ones you may find at flea markets , yard sales and auctions. Think about blending different mediums using old format 35 mm film scanned and digitized.Then  blend with other mediums,and then  combine as in my case a regular old unused postage stamp that I found and scanned digitally to make the above scene, which spans 40 or more years.
Have fun! 

1 comment:

Boogerette said...

Love the effect of combining the two pictures. Very cool the way you took the selfie and am impressed with how well it turned out. You should post pictures of your bark artwork on this blog as well.