jeudi 7 octobre 2004

Dead Roses... Signs of life again... creativity stirs within Salut readers... maybe one day I'll appreciate the time-saving advantages of the digital revolution in photography. It has taken quite a few hours to make the above image... processing film... making a number of prints... using chemical toners to convert the black-and-white original to an image with more feeling... But, it has jerked me out of my "State of Stuckness" which is no bad thing. Life after sixty (just) gets shorter by the day... and to waste a day brings the thought of these dead roses chillingly closer. But there is hope... the roses were given to me by an attractive woman from the local pharmacy - yes, women do give flowers to men in la belle France - and after a year they are now very dry, but firm, and still strangely beautiful. My Leica M3 clicked on them, very softly, and I made the image soft by narrowing the depth-of-focus in the darkroom by tilting the enlarger bellows slightly. Perhaps I could have achieved a similar image softness by using my cheap $10 plastic Holga camera - but of course the tool doesn't matter... it's in the mind that the image is first created. 8:04:58 PM    comment []