5. Helvetica

This one kind of surprises me. I wouldn’t have counted it as one of my top five photos – even from the other photos in that area I didn’t think this was the best. I do love the capital R in Helvetica, though. The swirls in the graffiti seem to match the rounded shoulder of the R and the drips form the stems, echoing the type. The intricate textures formed in the half-heartedly cleaned graffiti are what attracted me to the place initially. While I am surprised it is in the top five, I do like it.

4. Rumored Distress

This comes from my first diptychs series, “Outer Poetry”. All the photos have a scene on the left, with a person or body part on the right. The titles were generated by a random sentence generator. They were, and are, a lot of fun to make. Gives me a chance to go back through my older photos and make something interesting with the unused photos that would otherwise just sit on my hard drive.

This one did come together well, but again, wasn’t my favourite of the series. The photo on the left was taken out the front of my grandparents house, while on the right is a friend/neighbour playing with a sparkler at Easter.

3. The Beetles

This one is similar in style to the Outer Poetry series, but applied to a single photo. Taken in a neighbours yard as they were restoring one of them (the black one). Again, I had fun making it. Applying the textures and tweaking the colours and getting it all just right is very enjoyable for me. I think I restrained myself a bit on this one – no light leaks and reasonably natural colours.

On a related note, why do people blur out license plates? Is there really that much info you can get from it? Can you even get any information from a license plate?

2. Untitled

I don’t really like Untitled photos or artworks, as it’s generally lazy, but I can’t think of a title for this one. And perhaps the simplicity of it suits the untitled-ness. This was taken in the back yard of our house, and is about the third peg-related work of mine. It was named Retro::3 on deviantART after Retro::2, my first peg photo from 2004. The blueness of it is in homage to that photo too. In fact, looking at it now, I really love that shade of blue. I should make this blog that colour.

I had a great comment on it the other day. MyGreatestGift interpreted the photo in a completely different way:

nice, it looks like a diving board over some water with the reflection of itself, in an abstracted way

1. Metaphotography

This is mainly the most popular because it was put on Digg by someone, giving it over 3000 views (rare on Flickr – not so rare in deviantART, interestingly).

I actually took the photo back in about 2003 before I had a good digital camera and was experimenting with film. I remember wondering what would happen if I took a photo of a negative – if it would make the new negative into colour. I remembered this photo I had taken, found the negative and took a photo of it. When I had the film developed, sure enough the negative was now in colour… albeit fairly washed out and lacking contrast.

A few years later, in 2007, I was looking through some old film shots I shot back in 2003 and found this colour negative. It was kind of washed out, so I took a photo, pushed the contrast up and it came out quite well. It now resides as my number one most popular on Flickr.

Interestingly, the girl in the photos is the same as in #4.

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