Last weekend, I made some pre-production images for Babes With Blades Theatre Company’s upcoming play The S Paradox, by Jillian Leff, directed by Morgan Manasa. As I scrolled through images on my old flickr account today, I came across a preproduction photograph of actor Elyse Dawson I’d made for BWB’s 2015 play Patchwork Drifter, by Jennifer Mickelson, directed by Leigh Barrett. In 2015, Elyse and I had really liked that photo. I wondered if I could clean it up quickly and make it look presentable for 2023.
Limitations
We photographed this session in a basement in 2015, with the show’s director Leigh Barrett holding two small tungsten lights. I shot it on my first digital SLR, a Canon EOS 40D, which was decent for 2007 but very limiting. I had no flash or sophisticated lenses. Mostly I stuck to the “nifty fifty” 50 mm f/1.8 lens or kit zoom lens. I had much to learn.
In order to get both the gun and Elyse’s face in focus, I was shooting at f/10. To get an exposure in that basement, I shot at 3200 ISO (not great for that camera), shutter speed 1/40. In retrospect, I’m amazed anything came out in focus. I was squeezing that camera for everything it could give.
When I gave the photograph to Elyse, I put a sepia filter on it, and we had thought it was pretty cool.
Re-Edit
I thought it would be a fun challenge to re-edit that old photograph from Patchwork Drifter into something closer to what I might make today. Though limited by the original environment and equipment, software has come a long way to help get a little more out of older digital photos—in this case, Topaz Labs’s upscaling and sharpening software in conjunction with the current release of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. This software isn’t magic and can’t currently create flawless detail where it didn’t exist, but it can try.
Here’s my new speed edit of Elyse’s 2015 Patchwork Drifter portrait.
I like this one better.
Perhaps I’ll do more of these for The All Worlds Traveller as time permits. It’s fun to return to older work and try out new techniques, especially when those experiments bring the original work closer to the original intent. The textures come from Spoon Graphics.
Here’s a before/after comparison.
Project Update
A new Distant Era series is coming. I photographed it in June 2023 but have only just begun working on it. So far, things are going fine, if slowly. There are things I don’t know how to do, so I have to figure them out. Figuring them out takes time. I’m very excited about it because it’s what I wanted to do with Distant Era from the start, but I lacked the understanding back then. In December, I was finally able to catch up on work to the point where I could take time to find all my project files and figure out where I left off. I experimented, and though things weren’t quite right, I felt optimistic.
The first week of January, I evaluated what wasn’t right with the composition and came up with a solution I was happy with. I finished a heap of non-photography work for three other clients and then settled back in with a clearer plate. Now things are beginning to develop. Optimism for the project has begun to turn into excitement. There are still many things to learn and things I don’t know how to do yet. But I had a wonderful teacher in Chris Koeppen, I’ve made some progress, and that feels good.
I’m not shy about talking about the project in person, but writing in detail about it before it’s done doesn’t feel right. The story’s not yet told, and there’s so much left to do. When it is finally ready to go, I’m sure to be a fountain of words.
Follow Me