Creativity born of both impatience and technology

Every now and again happy accidents happen.

Just back from India, in the middle of developing the negatives, I was excited, keen and impatient to see the photographs in print.

I also wanted to share the excitement with others as I was looking at the negs through the enlarger. So I thought I could try photographing the projection of the negative, allowing me to text it to friend…

Out came the I-Phone, held next to the enlarger lens, et voilà, something was captured. But it didn’t really work as they were much too dark to see and anyone receiving it as a text would not be able to make out what it was. So I decided to run it through Photoshop and make it lighter.

Now obviously, I soon realised that to just make it lighter would have been a complete waste Photoshop’s abilities and, quite frankly, my time. Cue the image inversion, adjustment of curves, upping of the blacks, perhaps a frisson of contrast and a final touch, darkening the image. And there we go – an extremely grainy, fun, filmic raw image.

There was absolutely no need for me to do this and now that I have done the final prints these I-Phone images are completely redundant.

But it was fun.

Who knows, there may be some people out there who prefer these images to my final prints or there may be some who choose to use this technique for themselves, so rather than have them sitting on my phone gathering dust I thought I would post them here, and share them with one and all…