Tim Regan says:
One thing that flickr and the rise of digital photography has fostered is nostalgia for film. One way of rescuing old TLRs and other larger format film cameras is to run 35mm film through them. The trick is to develop the whole film, including the sprocket hole surround. The results (as pinkiestyle shows here) can be beautiful, and wear their allegance to film prominently.
Tim Regan says:
Even if one is shooting digital there are still analogue manipulations one can attempt to lend an abstract beauty to a photo. I'm not sure why this sense of beauty feels old, but it does. Here Lady Vervaine smears Vaseline onto the lens filter to acheive the blurred effect. I've presented this photo as a digital aping the old - but in fact it's more intriguing than that since Lady Vervaine shoots in film. It seems that the explosion of creativity and have-a-go culture that digital brings stretches out into analogue too.
Tim Regan says:
For me the pinacle of the digital reclamation of the aesthetic of old photography is Through the Viewfinder, and Area Bridges is a master at this technique. To work it one buys an old Twin Lens Reflex (TLR) cheaply from ebay, builds a contraption www.flickr.com/photos/russmorris/249081186/ to house your digital camera on top, phtographing the viewfinder.
Tim Regan says:
So far I've talked about the process of taking the photo, but of course digital imagary lends itself to experimental post production. This 360 panorama of Fountains Abbey by LadyCrafthole shows how taking one such technique, orriginally a utility to give one a wider view, can be taken to starting artistic extremes.
Tim Regan says:
The post production technique that seems to produce the mose visually arresting pictures is HDR, or High Dynamic Range. Here the camera takes several shots at differing exposures and software blends them together, to shed light in dark corners while muting the sun's full glare. In some ways this is more how the human eye works, but HDR is at it's best when it produces (cheesy) landscapes that rocket up the flickr interingness rankings. Cheesy they may be, but also beautiful.
Tim Regan says:
The primacy of the digital has lead to a resurgance of slower forms of rendering, especially the traditionally feminine crafts. These are re-applied to see the world ironically.
(NB I couldn't decide between this on or http://www.flickr.com/photos/crinolineshop/2980244598/ to illustrate the point.)
Tim Regan says:
Along with the digital comes a fascination with data and with lossless reproduction. In the crafts one can see an increased interest in 'multiples' and almost idiot savant meticulous drawings crop up repeatedly in art. This isn't one of those. It's a photo of bog cotton sticking up through the frozen surface of a pond, but it borrows the aethetic of abstract information visualization very well.
Tim Regan says:
Psot processing doesn't just have to be a local tool, or hours spent perfecting a PhotoShop skill. One of the www.dumpr.net/ applications takes one's photos and sets them in a gallery scene. The results look fabulous and again one feels strangely honoured to have one's photo in the gallery - albeit facked.
Tim Regan says:
The growth of digital proficiency over the last few years is astonishing. Special effects that looked awesome to me look hackneyed to my kids. But that journey, for example the difficulty of getting convincing CGI water, has led to its own aesthetic where the pixel itself is celbrated.
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