Introducing the Future

I was thinking to myself: I would want to read the struggles of what a artist goes through. I read, I believe in Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon, that “If you desire something and it doesn’t exist, create it.” I am writing this blog specifically for this reason. It will not be very polished, but it will be honest about what I am thinking and how I am feeling on a creative and artistic level. I call myself a fine art photographer and my beliefs about art and photography lie very much in this definition: “Fine art photography is photography created in accordance with the vision of the artist as a photographer, using photography as a medium to bring something to life that only lives in the artist’s mind.”¹ That being said, I am writing this for my own sake and not really for any other reason. I am not looking for validation, simply to be vulnerable and be honest about myself as a struggling artist. That, perhaps, someone may be able to benefit from my musings on my creative process, frustrations, dedication and growth. If just one person finds a connection and learns from this then that’s a win for me. Think of this as my version of Edward Weston’s day journal, but in this capacity it is monthly and it is available for everyone to read, anytime, anywhere.

I am sitting here writing in mid-August, reflecting on what happened in July. And some things definitely come to mind that did not go my way. I have had a desire to try out really long exposure photography for a while now. I purchased a 6 stop ND filter and was ready to get down to minutes or hours of exposure time with the film I’ve been using, Arista Ortho Litho 3.0. I went down to China Beach, here in San Francisco and made a few exposures, ranging from 30 seconds to 3 minutes. Nothing too long. I didn’t want to drown while getting my feet wet on my first “super” long exposure.

Funny enough, I bought a new ND filter and a yellow filter and lost them that day. I didn’t use them more than once or twice on one outing. I couldn’t believe it!

I developed the negatives and everything seemed to look great. Until I decided to try scanning a film (fig. 1) on an Imacon drum scanner. The scans showed terrible banding in some of the photographs I had taken, but I could not see them in the negative with the naked eye. At first I thought it was a problem with the scanner. I didn’t suspect anything was wrong with my camera because all I knew was everything was going fine until I made some scans. I decided to scan a series a negatives to see if they would yield the same banding (To eliminate some variables here). I did this, but didn’t trust my instincts of thinking its a problem with my camera. Long story short, it is not a problem with the scanner. I found this out when I printed the same negative in my darkroom and the same banding showed on the print (fig. 2,3). That’s when I knew it had to be my equipment.

There are some good things that happen in July though. I made a large digital print of one of my negatives. It was a learning experience, Ill tell you that much. It was one image that I took at China beach that didn’t have too bad of a light leak, The file size was mega huge, and the possible print size seemed impressive, but the results of a digital print simply were not good. It lacked clarity while even being very sharp on the screen. As if it got soft in the print process. It also is not as inky black as I prefer. However, I did say it was a learning experience. Seeing my image very large and on a wall made me rethink how images are composed large versus when they are small.

When an image is small (5x7 in), you can take all the information about the image all at once. When that same image is enlarged to 10 times the size (50x70 in) you can see the whole image from afar, but you consume the details in sections. Like the picture has pictures within the picture. A dream within a dream… I began to think about what images would be successful as large prints versus those that would be successful as contact prints and why. Also I thought that I could start composing my photographs with more elements in the “enlargement” mindset. So the picture almost has a story to tell, or a flowing direction inside of it.

There were some other notable things that happened in July, but I think I will end it here.


¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-art_photography


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Mitchell BakerComment