It's more than a little frustrating taking what feels like a few steps backwards. The style of lighting in previous shots has given a high degree of control and this last series had none of that! Using the snoots and with no dependency on ambient light I was able to create the image, the way i wanted it, in camera. With more experience i'm sure that i could of created some sort of barn door rig with ND Grad filters to kill off some of the light to give grey as well as the black and white. I guess the frustration lies in that I've had to settle for something less than I set out for! At least with Photoshop I can use these raw files...and turn them into images I actually like.
The process of editing couldn't be simpler, levels adjustment layer to alter the black and white point, a touch of sharpening and that's it. A crop comes later to ease the printing and to ditch a few distractions at the top. You could argue that this image wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on unless I had photoshop to help me out...but i don't see this as any different to common darkroom practice. It's non destructive, I'm not adding any information and through a carefully drawn mask I'm only taking light away. You can achieve the same effects with contrast filters and some clever technique, so I'm happy.
I like this a lot. I've settled on the explanation that I want the subject of my images to dissect the frame, it doesn't matter in this case at all that it's paper. In many of my research images I found lines that extended beyond the frame and force you to consider something larger.
This ability of the image to create something in your imagination fascinates me and I want to apply that to my own work so I moved away from the pretty little paper waves and ground out some lines!
( I would like to moan about the difficulty I had with the picture formatting whilst writing this post. )
