Everything is an Artifact

Inspired by might be stretching the term a little bit. And to be honest, I would probably try to emulate each of these photographers if I thought I might have a passing chance at it. No, the photos below show none of the grace and depth that the work of the photographers that inspired these does.

It never occurred to me until I saw the amazing and mysterious hand held pinhole shots on Flickr by Experiments in Dreaming, that one could even hand hold a pinhole camera. I knew I could never muster either the skill or wits to pull off something like those shots, but I was intrigued by the idea of hand held pinhole (or in this case, not quite pinhole shots)shots. It did feel really liberating to be shooting hand held something that would normally be encumbered by a tripod. As it turns out, my funky hand held shots didn't come out too badly! They're the only outdoor shots in the gallery the planter and the watering can. I do like the little extra bit of glow they have which I'm assuming is an artifact of my shaky grip on the camera.

Also on Flickr lately I've been noticing the wonderfully playful zone plate photos of Daphne Schnitzer. I don't see many zone plate photos on Flickr in general, and none before hers that made me want to dig out my zone plate and start shooting with it. Daphne's shots are digital, and I did get out my LTM to Sony E adapter so I could try a zone plate with my Sony Alpha. I was thrown off though by the images not being monochrome. Too much information! I do like color zone plate shots, but unless I can switch the Sony's display to monochrome, I probably won't continue to use it with a zone plate.

Actually I swapped the zone plate for a photon sieve for these shots. They were taken with a Skink Pancake system on my Leica Ic and developed in 5 month old Kompostinol. I think that the bubbles seen on some of the frames are the artifacts of over enthusiastic agitation on my part, hence the title of the article.

I edited these photos in a free program called Darktable. I've never really bonded with any free programs before, but I'm really liking this one. In some ways I'm even preferring it to the program it seems to be modeled on Adobe Lightroom. There is a learning curve to this, as there was to Lightroom for me, but for now, I'm enjoying figuring it out.