dragonlady7 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dragonlady7) wrote2015-12-05 03:57 pm
dragonlady7) wrote2015-12-05 03:57 pm
So to the anon who was asking about the pictures, here are some...
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So to the anon who was asking about the pictures, here are some of what I could find. My hard drive is still missing but I haven’t torn the place apart looking for it yet, so, *sigh*.
The first one is the photo I had the school bus darkroom guy take of Z and me not last Christmas but the one before. Note how my glasses frames look tinted! They weren’t. My skin looks tan too– it wasn’t!
The photo was taken outdoors in front of a backdrop, with a huge field camera, on a wet-plate tin negative. Exposure of about thirty seconds, you can see how I moved a little, and my dude clearly blinked repeatedly. The camera had no shutter, the guy just took the lens cap off.
And then we got to go watch him develop it in his darkroom. It was so cool.
The other images are Ida Denison, first a shot showing the tintype itself, and second a close-up of the tintype after I spent probably 10 hours Photoshopping the cracks out of it. Who is Ida Denison? Well, a relative of my mother’s, and she could tell you what year or so this has to have been taken– 1870s or 1880s I think, and could locate Ida in our family tree. But this is from a box of daguerreotypes a distant relative found, and gave to my mother to sort and label since my mother is the historian in the extended family. So I thought, for comparison, here is a tintype made back when this would’ve been the height of fashion. My tintype is on a plate of about 3x4 inches; Ida is about thumbprint-sized.
Back to the school bus darkroom guy, though. Follow that link, and there you will see someone who IS using antique technologies in a meaningful way, which was the basis of my rant. The last entry I saw on his blog involved customizing the tintype method, which is from about the 1870s, to take use of a miniature camera from the 1970s for which film is no longer made. Isn’t that a crazy mix-up of techniques? why would you do that? Well, because art. That’s art! That’s seeing what your really odd techniques will get you, and then doing it on purpose. That’s art.
Slapping a real old lens on your brand-new camera and changing nothing else of your technique? That’s maybe art but it’s a whole shitload less interesting, don’t ask me to care about it.
I would love to see Anton photograph the Hamilton cast– because almost the first thing everyone did when photography became accessible to nerds was take photos of Rev War veterans– but I bet you anything he’d shoot them not in their costumes. And it would be so much more interesting than the blah “taken with a mid-1800s camera lens and made sepia via Instagram filter” shit I keep seeing reblogged everywhere.
That was my point. That was my rant.
But you note, in the end, what are you actually looking at? You’re looking at digital photos of those tintypes. That’s how I was able to share them with you.
So to the anon who was asking about the pictures, here are some of what I could find. My hard drive is still missing but I haven’t torn the place apart looking for it yet, so, *sigh*.
The first one is the photo I had the school bus darkroom guy take of Z and me not last Christmas but the one before. Note how my glasses frames look tinted! They weren’t. My skin looks tan too– it wasn’t!
The photo was taken outdoors in front of a backdrop, with a huge field camera, on a wet-plate tin negative. Exposure of about thirty seconds, you can see how I moved a little, and my dude clearly blinked repeatedly. The camera had no shutter, the guy just took the lens cap off.
And then we got to go watch him develop it in his darkroom. It was so cool.
The other images are Ida Denison, first a shot showing the tintype itself, and second a close-up of the tintype after I spent probably 10 hours Photoshopping the cracks out of it. Who is Ida Denison? Well, a relative of my mother’s, and she could tell you what year or so this has to have been taken– 1870s or 1880s I think, and could locate Ida in our family tree. But this is from a box of daguerreotypes a distant relative found, and gave to my mother to sort and label since my mother is the historian in the extended family. So I thought, for comparison, here is a tintype made back when this would’ve been the height of fashion. My tintype is on a plate of about 3x4 inches; Ida is about thumbprint-sized.
Back to the school bus darkroom guy, though. Follow that link, and there you will see someone who IS using antique technologies in a meaningful way, which was the basis of my rant. The last entry I saw on his blog involved customizing the tintype method, which is from about the 1870s, to take use of a miniature camera from the 1970s for which film is no longer made. Isn’t that a crazy mix-up of techniques? why would you do that? Well, because art. That’s art! That’s seeing what your really odd techniques will get you, and then doing it on purpose. That’s art.
Slapping a real old lens on your brand-new camera and changing nothing else of your technique? That’s maybe art but it’s a whole shitload less interesting, don’t ask me to care about it.
I would love to see Anton photograph the Hamilton cast– because almost the first thing everyone did when photography became accessible to nerds was take photos of Rev War veterans– but I bet you anything he’d shoot them not in their costumes. And it would be so much more interesting than the blah “taken with a mid-1800s camera lens and made sepia via Instagram filter” shit I keep seeing reblogged everywhere.
That was my point. That was my rant.
But you note, in the end, what are you actually looking at? You’re looking at digital photos of those tintypes. That’s how I was able to share them with you.