2010-10-06

#429, Tobacco

In keeping with the recent streak of photos that fall down in some way (see the two posts below, #464 and #025), this is one that's an absolute disaster that I still think worked out okay in the end.

I'm a novice photographer: I shift and change constantly, working with new equipment and starting over far more often than I should. (If only I could enjoy monogamy in my photography as much as I do in the rest of my life!) This was taken with a Fuji GX680III, a monster of a medium-format film camera that's completely set me back to zero. There's so much that can go wrong that I'm not even sure what the problems are. The dirty tobacco-stained colour is probably from a bad scan, but I can't say for sure because I'm also using an unfamiliar film in a camera without a light meter, and this negative has some serious exposure issues that probably resulted from my not securing the bellows properly when I changed lenses at the end of my previous roll. Although I try not to use with violent connotations to describe my photography - like 'shoot' - I can only say that I had to beat this image into submission.

But when I set up the camera to take this photo, I was looking for a way to convey the removal of the Harley Davidson dealership, driven out by land values and encroaching condominiums, as a desolate and negative thing. I didn't expect the result to look like this, but I don't mind that it does.

One thing's for sure: now that my personal photography is 95% film, my lemon-to-lemonade ratio has skyrocketed.

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I have broken the links to hundreds and hundreds of photos, which will take a long time to repair. The workaround is to replace "photo.matthewpiers" in the link URL with "matthewpiers.smugmug". Awkward, but only temporary.

This is happening because I have revamped matthewpiers dot com. More of what I write and photograph will be going there, so check it out as well.

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