Location Taken: Valparaiso, Indiana
Time Taken: 2007
During college, I took a bunch of photography classes. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, it’s never been my favorite form of art, but it’s still one I enjoyed enough to keep up with.
I don’t have digital copies of most of the photos I took in those classes. They were mostly film photography classes, and I didn’t get my own digital camera until my last year of college. I did take a bunch of good photos, though, so I had a few odd ideas for saving them.
This one was my attempt to scan a negative. Negatives are what is actually created by a film camera on the film, an image that inverts all the colors. It’s just how the various optics work best, and is actually necessary for making the photographic paper come out the correct color. White light shines through the negative, with the inverted colors letting through the proper wavelengths to make the chemicals react the way you want. It’s a lovely bit of chemistry and physics, really.
This particular negative was one I never fully printed out. It’s a bunch of bolts of cloth at a local fabric store, not too fancy to spend the time and money to print out in full, but still nice enough to give it a try. Besides, the slew of colors would give a really good example of how this worked.
Alas, my scanner was too low quality to really get the colors right, much less the detail. When I tried inverting it in a graphics program, it didn’t look any better than this.
Actually, since this looks pretty nifty, I’d say the “true color” version was actually worse. This one at least has heaps of that “artsy” look that some photographers go for intentionally.
