splash

splash
Originally uploaded by mehampson

I'm out of town for a few days and will be blogging about some older stuff that's already been uploaded to Flickr. I'm taking new photos, but I won't be back at my own computer until next week. It's a little reminiscent of film shooting, in that I have a load of images that I can't sort through immediately. So in the meantime, I think I'll highlight some of my actual film images -- though I don't have many scanned and uploaded.

This is one of my favorite prints. The splash effect was done in the darkroom -- the only digital retouching involved was a little tweaking of the levels after I scanned the print.

Originally it was taken on Tri-X film with either a Sears KS-1 (a rebranded Ricoh XR-6) shortly before it's fatal trip down a flight of stairs, or the Canon Rebel 2000 that I replaced it with. The photograph itself was nothing special -- a slightly blurred shot of a friend holding a tree, with the wind blowing her hair into her face. A little dark and not too contrasty, which makes me think it was the KS-1, since the Rebel 2000 had much better light metering.

I still wanted to do something interesting with it, so I made a normal exposure on the print paper, but instead of soaking the entire sheet in developer fluid, I just splashed it heavily on one side. This gave it the irregular but natural splatter pattern.

I tried this technique on a couple different prints, but this one was by far the most interesting and compelling result.