Here's one fresh off the grill. I thought I'd try something a little different with the new negatives I collected on my road trip, because we all know consistency is the hobgoblin of blah blah-blah blah.
This is a montage of the field in Iowa and a light switch from that run down school. Not only did it take a while to figure out how to mask off all the superfluous negative space, but then I had to deal with getting everything to line up nicely in the darkroom. After I figured out exposure times, and got things sitting at the correct angle I had to deal with a few tedious corrections. Here's my first attempt:
You can see the glowing halo around the plate, that's because my layer mask was too big. I had to go in and out of the darkroom and with an xacto knife scrape away the mask until it was a more fitting size. Also, in this first attempt the shadow of the switch is falling in the opposite direction as the rest of the scene, and we can't have that. So after a flip and a flop and some TLC, I think I got it to where I like it.
My picture is based off an earlier digital picture. Ch-ch-check it:
This is a picture is called "Socket Ruins, Oregon" from 1992 and it's by Tyrone Georgiou (b. 1947). Sadly I couldn't find much about him online. This picture always stuck with me though, so I had to repazent. It was meant to show the ease that the new digital medium could be manipulated, distorting the truth that people expect photographs to hold. How people will be able to change the past convincingly and such. I guess he was right, except these days we mostly use this ability to remove stretchmarks.