For now, I’ve been experimenting with ways to infuse images with deep, vibrant colours. A few of the resulting images are below.

Enjoy!

Light Leaks and Hand Marks

With the digital medium, as my own work is concerned, I strive for perfection; every time. Whether I achieve it or not is a whole different discussion, but nevertheless that is my aim. To me, there just seems to be something contrived and false about “adding” defects and faults to digital images in order to garner some sort of visual interest. It feels unnatural, inorganic and sometimes downright gimmicky.

As such, I rather expected my approach to film work to be just that, an exercise in the futility of perfection. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Chemical Contamination

From the moment I watched the first image appear in the developing tank and with it came the dust marks and scratches and drying marks inherent to the dark room. I was in love. I knew getting rid of these “flaws” is easy; both in the darkroom and in Photoshop, yet I didn’t even try to convince myself to do so. They seemed natural. They seemed right. They felt authentic. I was in love from the very first moment, despite what I thought were deeply ingrained prejudices.

But, was it just novelty?

Solarisation

A few more rolls of film and wet prints later and I can state with absolute certainty that novel is not the word to describe it and the basic “flaws” were clearly just the beginning. Some short burst experiments showed me that intentionally “ruining” the images left effects that seemed just as natural as the inherent ones. Cue a massive stroke of inspiration and sense of amazement in my image making.

Suddenly, I was pushing films far beyond their intended speeds, scratching negatives, intentionally not drying films properly after development, leaving rebates visible in the enlarger, solarising prints, praying for chemical contamination in the developing process and so on and so forth. The results: a ton of utterly unique images that I’m absolutely over the moon with. Of course, it could just be me and the rest of the world could very well hate them, but I’ve rarely been so utterly excited to get out and see what’s next, what else I can create and what else I can “ruin”.

Push Processing

Bearing all this in mind, it kind of goes without saying that I need to entertain this new found passion and find out exactly where it leads. As such, I’ve decided that for the foreseeable future (it could be weeks or it could be months) all of my photographic work that isn’t commissioned will be undertaken in the medium of film. To me, the creative possibilities are endless and I want to explore them all!

Extreme Push Processing Leads To Grain the Size of Your Head

Just one final note simply so I can contradict myself: I apologise about the images here. No scan can ever do a physical wet print the justice it deserves!

We tried for a different sort of look for this set by using all natural light to really bring out the details in her top and bag.

Here are a few previews from the full set:

Feel free to check out the full set on Zivity HERE.

If you’re not a member and would like a free 30 day trial membership to the site, just drop me a line in the contact form here and I’ll happily send one along.

As always, thanks for looking!

Just because every once in a while, there’s a concept that’s a bit too far fetched for anyone else!

For too long have I found myself yearning to pull out my first camera (as well as some new acquisitions) and regress to the glory of film. Little did I know, that developing film at home isn’t quite the task it’s made out to be. Here’s a small selection from a shoot last week with Ambellina.

A few images from a recent set with Sophie.

Most everything I’ve shot with Sophie before has kind of an edgier feel to it and with this set, I wanted to do something a bit softer. Hopefully, you’ll agree that it’s a case of mission accomplished!

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Unfortunately, these changes take time. I am striving to have this transition complete in no time at all!

In the meantime, please enjoy the new layout as well as the content!