App Happy ...

I’ve been having a lot of fun with a variety of image making apps on my iPod Touch.

The presets, filters and effects available in the apps are quite amazing and have opened up a door to low-res, spontaneous creativity I hadn’t considered before.

Of course I can take and post a heavily tweaked image on the fly while walking through the Financial District, but there is so much more potential here. I can take any photo I’ve ever made, create a jpeg file, email it to myself, pick it up on the iPod Touch, run it through various filters and presets in one or more of these apps, then email the new version to myself, open it on my desk top computer, re-size it and make a pretty nice print.

These are wonderful little tools that have allowed me to go beyond my straight forward approach to making photographs and into another world of “image” making. The new versions of my photos become impressions and expressions of a feeling or sense of the moment that is often totally unrelated to the actual moment the original photo was made. They become illustrations of something completely different.

(I’m currently working with EyeEm, Instagram, Starmatic, FxCamera for stills and Fast Camera and 8mm for video. All these apps are free and can be downloaded from the iTunes store in minutes.)

Photo: ©2013 David W. Sumner

A Daily Dose: July 15, 2013

8th Avenue, during the Sunday, Inner Sunset Farmers' Market.

San Francisco, California. ©2013 David W. Sumner

Old Film Never Dies

I was in the basement a couple days ago, digging onto the file cabinet that houses all my transparencies from the '80s and '90s, when I came across an exposed roll of Tri-x labeled 2/6/97. It was the last few feet of a 100 foot reel I had bulk loaded back when I was working at a lab downtown.

I quit working at the lab before having that last roll processed and I just never got around to doing anything with it, until this week. I had no idea what, if any, images would be on the film. So with nothing to lose I souped it in Diafine and was more than surprised with the results. Not only were there images, but the density of the negs was right on the money, with good contrast too.

The really funny thing is that about a week ago I had been thinking of some images I shot in the West Portal MUNI station way back when. I was in the station recently and noticed it hadn't changed much at all since I shot those pictures.

You can imagine my surprise when I pulled that roll of 16 year old film out of the tank to see those very images. There they were as if I had shot them yesterday.

It's interesting how memory works, or doesn't work. For some reason I remembered these images all these years without ever seeing prints or even the negatives. I just remembered making them and what I was looking at as I pressed the shutter. There are images I have made just earlier this year that I look at and have to ask my self, "Where the hell was I when I shot that?"

That's just how it works, I guess.

Photo: ©1997 David W. Sumner

A Daily Dose: July 7, 2013

Abandoned buildings on the Presidio, San Francisco, California.

©2013 David W. Sumner

A Daily Dose: July 6, 2013

Readers Bookstore cafe, Fort Mason, San Francisco, California.

©2013 David W. Sumner