A Year in Photos

Photography, fiction, and personal essays form my three primary creative outlets. For this blog's first 18 months, I used it primarily for photography. As I've returned to creative writing, I'll use this blog for fiction, too. Sometimes, when reality needs to be discussed more than truth, I write personal essays.

This blog will continue to showcase as many above-average photos as I can muster. Hopefully my written work will be as good or better than the visual. Whichever drew you here -- photographs or fiction, I hope you enjoy both.

Monday, February 11, 2013

Back in Black: A Dingy Kodak Developer Can

This week's first image is this one:

That is one dingy old can of Selektol. So, today's fun fact: I don't just own old cameras. I own all kinds of old photo stuff. Some time this year, this can will be opened, mixed, and used, too.

Look at that label, which looks like paper that's about to fall off the can. Stains, fingerprints, all kinds of nasty grime. What a mess. But, here's another image of that can:

It's not rally all that dingy. In fact, it's kinda clean-ish. And the label's painted on, not paper. So how did that messy effect in the firs image happen? It was a happy accident, actually.

I layered two images on top of each other and then had the computer automatically blend them. The images didn't perfectly align, so here was the color result:

Pretty much useless for everything, right? Well, everything except monochrome conversion. Those red-green-violet mixing blobs can become image accents in monochrome. Basically, I just adjusted the sliders until I found a result I liked. That result was this (again):


For fun, here are a couple more images of the Selectol can:




Tomorrow, we'll look at this photo and talk about how I arrived at it and other variations on this subject.


For a quick and basic tutorial on how to do monochrome conversion in Photoshop, check out my video on the topic.

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