Friday, September 19, 2014

No Camera Needed at Exit270


Man Ray, the painter and photographer once said “To express what I feel I use the medium best suited to express that idea, which is also always the most economical one.” He was best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography and is noted for his work with photograms, which he called “rayographs” in reference to himself.

One of my early experiments in photography was making photograms, which is the placing of objects on photosensitive paper and exposing them to light.  After processing in the usual print processing chemicals you ended up a negative silhouette on black background with some gray.  It was something you could spend hours experimenting with.  However, today in the digital world of photography the scanner that comes with your printer and a photo processing program is all you need to explore this challenging, “No camera needed photography.”

So, following Man Ray’s advise on using the most economical medium to image some fall leaves – I chose the scanner.  The final images you see here are leaves combined with some digital created backgrounds with a bit of hue and saturation manipulation.  I placed the leaves face down on the scanner and covered them with either a black or white sheet of paper –and then brought them into Photoshop for the final imaging.  The backgrounds can be either downloaded free off various Internet sites or created by shooting different patterns you find while out on your photo walks.













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