Another Dinosaur

It’s true, I’ve posted a lot of these.

Here is yet another take on this classic. I like the dark tones and the prominence of orange and blue, along with the slightly distorted wide-angle perspective.

I am headed off to the desert tomorrow (armed with plenty of film of all kinds) for a week’s worth of backpacking, so I hope to return at the end of the week with all sorts of interesting things (hopefully photos- interesting stories about brawling with the TSA about hand checking my Portra 800 or finding more light leaks are not the sort of interesting things I hope to return with). This is a part of the country (and really a world landscape type) I have never seen before, so it’s anyone’s guess what I’m in for.
You know you’re a photographer when you sacrifice precious pack space (and weight) for a camera, two lenses, and roughly ten rolls of film (the final roster has yet to be determined, but I’m planning on carrying everything from Velvia to APX400 to the now-dead 100UC).

This particular shot is another remnant from the days of my Pentax digital SLR, which has been sold off.

Untitled

This was going to be posted on Valentine’s Day before I shot something I found more appropriate on a number of levels.

Pentax digital SLR, Polaroid-inspired processing.

Dinosaur II

Looks can be deceiving.

The next Dinosaur in my series, actually photographed minutes after the first. I didn’t really have anything interesting to do with this one, however, until I created my cross process simulation, as seen on the redux of Reading. This is tricky though- Reading II, with its smooth, muted colors, was shot on expired film. This image, which, in addition to color shifts has extreme grain and appears to have aged badly, is digital. Part of this is necessity- it was dark, and my digital performs poorly at high sensitivities. The rest, of course, is taking this flaw and running with it: An image this noisy will never work as a high-fidelity piece of digital art. What will it work as? Perhaps a digital replication of/homage to the low-fidelity world of the cross processed negative. Is it cross processed? No. Does it look like a cross process? Not really. Does it work? You tell me.

Pentax digital SLR operating at an unfathomably high sensitivity to price ratio. Image quality follows accordingly.

Blue Eye

Photography is improvised

If my camera produces unacceptable noise at ISO 3200, I can convert it into grayscale. Noise (color aberration) becomes grain (tone aberration). Much of photography is like this, and working around technical limitations is a day-to-day exercise for many photographers.

Pentax digital.

Dinosaur

Photography does not conform to a schedule.

Sometimes you’re walking home, the light is perfect, and you see something you need to shoot. Sometimes this involves going back to your apartment, getting your camera and the pieces you want and need, dealing with batteries that are dying because you never charge them (about fifty percent of my shots ended with some sort of awful noise, a blank screen, a corrupt file, and a reset to ISO 200 f/8), and going back to the scene of your vision. Sometimes it isn’t worth it, but sometimes it is.

Pentax digital, which now has freshly-charged batteries.