Experimenting with Redscale

Tags

altered color, canvas, false color, film, film cameras, lomography, manual focus, printing, redscale, scanning

I’ve been working hard on getting a set of pictures together for my upcoming show at Washington University Medical School in December – so much so that I, getting old and confused, misread the exhibition year as 2016 when it’s really 2017. So a year and not a month away, but the effort has been fully worthwhile and is likely to lead to a better show altogether when it comes together next year.

I’ve been printing almost exclusively on canvas, a medium I like because it encourages a more painterly looking image that suits my current style of moving away from precision and towards impression.

This film photograph, shot using the reverse-rolled Lomography Redscale color film, is a particularly good example of a photograph well suited to canvas. The strong browns and reds produced by shooting a photograph through the red-tinted cellulose acetate backing give this landscape a feel very much reminiscent of landscape painters of the 18th and early 19th centuries.

I used an old and worn Nikon F3 that I bought as a bargain from the second-hand camera dealer KEH and an equally old 20mm Nikon manual focus lens to generate the negative. A digital scan of that give me the jpg that I used to make the canvas print. The result enhances both the grain of the film and the curious color balance, with blue-tinted shadows, yellow-tinted highlights and brown-red midtones.

As a result the picture looks very old, not in the least bit suggesting that I shot it a month ago in October. Of course, the lack of any modern elements in the composition enhances this appearance. I like this timeless feel. I’ve just ordered some more redscale film – I think this is a technique well worth experimenting with.

 

Purple Prairie

Tags

false color, film, Forest Park, LomoChrome Purple, lomography, playing, prairie, standards, wetlands

 

Purple Wetlands II by Richard Keeling on 500px

Over the past year, I’ve concentrated a great deal of my photography into my ride home from work through Forest Park.

Not that I ignored the park beforehand. It’s just that I’ve felt a deeper affinity with the ground I cross. Perhaps this is the result of familiarity. Perhaps it’s through the growing realisation that retirement might pull me away from my regular route through these paths before too much more time has passed.

Whatever it is, I’ve collected a large collection of photographs of much the same things. Enough to sense the change of the seasons. Enough, too, for experimentation.

Such as these images. Not, as you might initially think in these digital days, the result of an Instagram-like filter. No, these are film shots taken with a color film that is balanced to render greens as purples and blues as greens. Only reds look normal.

Well, there’s little red in these images. Instead, a strangely alien appearance. Familiar in shape and wildly weird in color.

It’s a fun thing, using this LomoChrome Purple 35mm film. Playing, really, but I need to play with my photography. Especially now that I’ve been immersed in it for a long time. Long enough to get a sense of what ‘serious’ photographers do and what dilettantes tinker with. Becoming a serious photographer can be a death knell for creativity, boxing you into a narrow range of what is right and proper – and that can apply equally to popular or art directed photography, or indeed any type that has been around long enough to establish some sort of standard.

Standards be damned. There’s nothing more effective as an inhibitor. I’ll enjoy these, and doubtless collect a few more shots on my way home tonight. Not LomoChrome though, I’m out of film. Time, perhaps, for a fresh order.




Purple Wetlands by Richard Keeling on 500px