A brief tour of my photo process

I’ve gone through a bunch of versions of a photo process.

I started out shooting C41 print film. I picked it up from the drugstore. I’d drop it back at the drugstore for the non-one-hour version of development when I was done. I’d stick the prints in a non-archival plastic tub.

Then digital cameras came along. And I got really really interested. So I got a Mamiya RB67 medium format camera as well as a long-running series of digital cameras, and so sometimes I’d shoot film-hybrid where I’d figure out where I wanted to go with the digital camera and then take the “real” shots on film. But after a while, I ended up switching back into a mostly digital mode.

This can always change again?

OM System, formerly Olympus, makes the only digital bodies I like

The Olympus, then OM System bodies come with Live Time mode, which lets me preview a long-exposure photograph while I’ve got the shutter open, therefore that’s the system I use. Conveniently, they are also reasonably ergonomic (at least for me) and nicely sized and shaped.

I like to warp your reality, therefore I can only edit so much

If someone were to invent a teleportation device, it would ruin a lot of the magical illusions. Right now, when the magician pulls away the scarf to show that there’s not a coin in their hands anymore and pulls it from behind your ear, it’s within the context of there being some amazing skillful trick that you just can’t spot. If there were actual teleporters you’d be excited at the demo a few times but within a year or so it would recede into the background where maybe, if you are lucky, you are reminded that you got two hours of commuting back and it would otherwise be no more magical than driving at 55 mph.

Magicians get punchy about their tricks being revealed but, honestly, knowing the trick doesn’t necessarily help. They’ll come up with a new and different way to pull off the stunt. Or maybe if you try it you realize that you aren’t that flexible or that athletic or dexterous or that good at keeping the patter going.

Either way, photography can be a form of illusion. You can use very simple tricks like choosing a particular angle and a particular lens, more complicated tricks like what part of the environment you use (ideally, the maximally fantastic one), onto elaborate lighting rigs and lightpainting.

Thus, I avoid doing a lot of editing on my photos so as to preserve the magic of illusion. If you were to look at the RAW file or original film, you’d very much recognize the exact same image, it’s just that I might have cropped the image or removed some blemishes or whatnot.

AI image generators are not used here

There’s a bit of “AI” in the noise reduction for my RAW converter (I use DxO) and I’m mostly OK with that.

Pretty much anything else under the “AI” umbrella I’m avoiding.

Homebrew hardware

I’ve got a lot of homebrew bits I’ve constructed over the years to get my results.