Working backwards and why

Its funny, we live in the digital age and yet I find myself more fascinated with the photography of the early 20th century than i do the latest greatest of today. In a nutshell, I work backwards.

I shoot on Digital with my very reliable Canon Rebel XT DSLR and i shoot on film with various rigs that are older than our collective grandparents. I have many cameras that i love. getting film for them is a whole other adventure, but places do sell it. 620 film is the hardest to get. Then, suddenly one day medium format became the new low fi rage and 120 was available almost everywhere.

I digress. Taking a digital raw image and working it through my various post process methods can be difficult in ways you can't imagine. Film, and especially back in the early days of photography, had very specific things going on. Weird lens wobbles, grain, texture, tone, uneven focus the list goes on and on.

My simple example:

Thats about 5 hours of work. Getting it right, down to the oddball errors an old camera would make. I love it. I love the unique look and feel of old photos. I love the way they make me wonder...I just figure in a past life, I was some guy with a giant box camera shooting everything I could..because i can't paint.

Its funny, about 3 minutes after the camera was invented, somebody somewhere had taken the first nude images. I guess thats when 'porn" started driving technology..ha!

The first one of these dates pre 1920s and other 2nd is definitely early 20's. I love how they look. I dig the uniqueness of them. I mean, back then, cameras were a novelty at best and not everyone had them. So these are the work of an artist, who in previous centuries would have been painting a subject to get this same image.

The photographic muse was born. This is what inspires me, to photograph what I can't paint. While I'll struggle with the term Artist, I do feel its an artistic endeavor..its just something I love.

Its strange to think I may have enjoyed photography in its early days more than i do in the modern age. Go figure. But here I am..working backwards.

Credits: From my images, the models are Lillian Raven and London Andrews.