Homelights

The front of this house catches such good light.

Ode to a Scanner

I enjoy scanning photographs, I don't know why. Maybe it's because it reminds me of my early days of photographs - scanning my shiny new prints to upload them to lomography.com, seeing the photographs in a new light. Two new lights really - first you scan them, and they are different, lit up by thousands of little computer screen lights. Then you put them on the internet, and they acquire the veneer of a thing with the potential of being looked at by a huge number of people, visible anywhere and at any time. Suddenly it's not yours anymore. Your physical photographs, held in your hands and seen only by yourself and the person who printed and bagged them, are suddenly exposed and seem different, smaller somehow. I always feel this way when uploading photographs, same with music. There are obviously plenty of printed photos I've not put on the internet, but some prints I actually like I've never even scanned, and I don't think I ever will. I try not to be too sentimental about material objects (which to be honest is very difficult, I'm pretty materialistic), but with these photographs I think I'll keep them precious, visible only in one place and at one time.


With this in mind, I made some music based around the sound of the particular scanner I happen to be using at the moment (I've owned maybe four ever, all but the first one [which was my parents'] of them secondhand). It came from a charity shop and cost me two euros or something ludicrous. It's pretty banjaxed at this stage, and there's the tell-tale white line appearing on one side of the image. But it makes a great noise.

   Ode to a Scanner by DeclanQKelly

John Cyr's Developing Trays - Wynn Bullock reminder

John Cyr is photographing the paraphernalia of film photography that is fast becoming (or already has become) obsolete.

More here

 

Most of the trays have the little drip corner on the bottom right, and these look like commas to me.

One of the trays belonged to Wynn Bullock, whose name I'd been trying to remember for the last week or so - his "colour abstractions" have been in my head for a while as I'm seeing their influence shine through in some stuff I'm doing at the moment.

EDIT

 I originally wrote this post before I woke up fully, but the "stuff I'm doing at the moment" actually refers to the "end" photos, the offcuts from the printing machines in photolabs. The colours and sometimes even the forms have pretty striking similarities to Wynn Bullock's abstractions.

Wynn Bullock, Color Light Abstractions from Lumière on Vimeo.

Salthill by night