Shutter Stories
Monday, August 3, 2009 at 11:02PM 
I love photography. I started taking classes at a community art center when I was 13. I was never an artsy person but I fell in love with photography as quickly as a 1/500 shutter speed (photography joke). I took as many classes as I could. I filled up my summers and my high school class schedule with photography courses. I started learning with a canon 35 mm. I knew digital photography existed but it didn't even occur to me to go digital. I wanted to struggle getting negative on the reel, be in the red lights of the dark room, and smell the fixer all over my hands.
I enjoy the hands on processes involved with photography. The more hands on the better. I was fascinated by the scrappiness of the Holga. I enjoyed loading the 120 film and getting out a huge roll of duct tape and taping it up. Sometimes I'd make sure to leave little holes in certain places so I could get random light leakage.
The spring of my senior year my photography teacher introduced me to 35 mm color slides and a process called polaroid transfers. I loved the process much more than any else I'd ever done. It's a process that involves separating a Polaroid before it is full developed and transferring it onto another material (paper, a book, wood...etc). You can also boil the image off of the Polaroid (also known as lifting) and rearrange it on a new piece of paper and stretch it anyway you want.
Two years ago I got my own daylab (a machine for doing transfers) and I print when I can. It takes time and a lot of money ($1.50 a print) so I can't print as often as I like. Even worse, Polaroid has now stopped producing the film that I need in order to do prints. I guess I'll just have to buy them up before they sell out.
Here are a few Polaroid transfers I've done over the years.
Reader Comments (2)
I love those photos! Very cool. I'm a 'lazy' photographer- digital SLR, then play with the photos on my macbook. But oh well, I enjoy it. In high school, I took photography lessons in a studio with a dark room, and it was one of the best experiences of my life. Hmm.. I wonder how much a dark room would cost. :)
Isn't the process of film photography great? I love pushing the boundaries and medium of film and photo paper. Seeing your work makes me want to go into doing it again. Or at least post my college photo work.
Now I'm an HDR nut, which in a way has an odd similar feeling working in the darkroom. There's a sort of magic merging the exposures together and seeing what happens when the image gets tonemapped.