Out Of The Vault

Here is an oldie out of the vault. NO EDITING. That's right. What you see is what I got. This picture could possibly be one of my first ever successful cityscape shots. The photograph would have been taken around 2003, I was eager and keen to explore what I could do with my new Rebel G that I had purchased in NYC in 2002. I had been blown away years earlier by Ken Duncans panorama work and yearned so much to take colour rich photographs as he did. 

Knowing NOTHING, I researched as much as I could and even went back to visit his gallery in Matchem, NSW, where my mother had taken me as a young woman, to probe and ask questions. It was here that I discovered Velvia. I had a long and loving relationship with Velvia that to this day will never cease. Some of my greatest flukes were achieved on Fuji's Velvia film stock.

I travelled from Berkeley Vale, where I was staying(Central Coast NSW) to Erina to buy this "magical" Velvia, only to find out a week or so later that Fletchers sold it just in the city, near where I lived. At the time of purchase I had a huge shock, it was the most expensive film stock I had ever purchased in my life. It was $20 per roll! Looking back I laugh at myself and feel rather silly.

I was told 2 things from the sales woman at Erina where Ken Duncan processed and printed his work. Keep the ASA down low for maximum colour effect and don't shoot portraits. Velvia is not kind to skin tones. 

I had already been shooting time exposure sunsets and sunrises on regular Kodak 200 ASA consumer stock and had been quite bitterly disappointed. I am not knocking Kodak, I have worked with cinematographers who I greatly admire, who shoot on Kodak and the results are truly lovely. I was simply barking up the wrong tree for the effect that I was after. It was incredibly frustrating to not know where I was going wrong esp since I had no formal training in photography at the time. 

I went out with a friend, Ricky Kang, who worked at the time in Sydney's Animial Logic, who was very kind to show patience with me as we shot the sun going down from North Sydney looking back at the city. It had been a showery day and we were purely experimenting with our exposure. Set to an ASA of 50, the aperture on f22 and the shutter on bulb... we sat and waited and clicked away appropriately. 

I took my film in for developing at Fletchers in either Chatswood or Pitt St (I can't remember now) and my gosh, did I feel like a million dollars when I saw that one photograph that captured colour so dramatically as this. It was worth every crappy shot that I had taken over the previous months. It is by no means a prize winning photograph, but a true moment in my life where I finally felt myself moving forward as photographer, with a chance at taking rather good pictures.

Years later, in 2005, I had the slide scanned to disk by a photographer from Cairns who was printing on Endura paper, this was all new at the time, a metallic paper from Kodak (I hope it was Kodak- sorry if I am wrong). We looked at the levels of the picture in photoshop which he commented that they were rather good, but then he said.. "how about we add a touch of magenta" and the result is what you see above. 

What got me, was how did he know that magenta was the colour to add? Why not red or orange? It still gets me to this day. Hence my determination to go back to the basics and understand colour theory. 

I really do enjoy looking back at this picture, it reminds me how much I have grown as a photographer and how much more there is to learn.