You Will Never Be Enough For Me

Let’s get something straight I think I might have misrepresented: The title of the work displayed above, headlined above the picture, and any prose, musings, ventilations, rationalizations, or disparate fantasies that follow below – what you’re reading now – yeah, they have nothing to do with each other. Even when I’m discussing the displayed photo art itself, which I guess I do about half the time, the title still has nothing to do with it. The title is a product of the work, what I’ve tried to reveal or the emotion lurking within. The prose may discuss the technique I used or may go off onto something on my mind; some insight I may think I know. The prose is … well, it’s mainly because I can’t keep my mouth shut.

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Creating photo art from film photography, because of the static nature of film, is much more dependent on the nature of the photograph itself; much more so than a digital image. There are fewer data points to which the artist can grab onto using the computer. I like to describe the creation of photo art as digging into the pixels to reveal hidden aspects of the photographic capture. But an image based on film cannot be dug so deeply into; its structure is set. It’s like trying to dig into rock instead of soil. Which isn’t necessarily bad; there are some gorgeous rocks.

Use of a wide aperture when capturing the photograph, which creates a narrow focal plane, is one technique that lends itself to the artistic process later. It creates very sharp edges, offset by a softer background. This can become particularly pronounced in black and white photography as there are no distracting colors. The artist can utilize a number of techniques to extenuate the edging. Every rock, as it happens, has crevasses.

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​NOTE: This is the third post in a series examining the application of digital techniques to film photography in creating photo art, done in tribute to the closing of the last regional retail photography stores.