If you're shooting film and not making proper proof contact sheets, you really should be. I've shot film for more than 40 years but I've only consistently made proper proofs for the past few. For a good while, I shot and developed my film, then scanned it and used the scans to choose and images to print in the darkroom (with the added bonus that I had the scanned images to use online).
A few years back, a Mac OS update made my Epson Perfection V750 scanner the definition of tedium to use...pausing after every single image it scans so that a roll of film can take half an hour or more to scan....
I’ve been collecting Victorian and Edwardian photographs for quite a few years now, but I’ve always shunned the popular colourised images from this era as just a little bit tacky. I had a handful in my collection as curiosities only. Recently, though, I’ve been trying to perfect the art of hand-spotting photographic prints using correcting inks and while playing with the green-shaded olive-tones put some washes on a few of my own reject photos. Then, by chance, a few weeks back I came across a small collection of hand-coloured Edwardian studio images in an East London flea market; my interest...
I’ve said before that my photography is influenced by the earliest purveyors of the medium: the Victorian and Edwardian studio photographers who shot nudes and historical reconstructions to peddle as “artists’ aids”, used as an alternative to life models. For obvious reasons, many of the original buyers had never held a paintbrush in their life! Considered pornographers in their time, the images they produced would today be considered moderate in the extreme. But recreating the look and feel of these photographs is a challenge.
There are many aspects to replicating this early...