Wallace Koopmans Artlog

A couple images from the last week with my Baby Bessa.

Four exposures on one Polaroid Spectra film.  Playing on the trampoline

I guess this was someones idea of golden lions.  Taken with the Canon Ql17.

I thought it would be fun to take pictures of the concrete lions I came across.  The fun didn’t last too long as there really is a limited number of forms.  Sometimes an idea runs into a dead end but it’s in the effort that new discoveries can be made.

Dunach elementary in Abbotsford, a rural school with a long history, is scheduled to be closed down this year.  These two images represent small instants of the larger times and changes that occur to a building like this and by extension communities.

Here is a different take, where I have literally placed Dunach Elementary on the proverbial chopping block.  Trite, but if you don’t know what is then how can you produce art that isn’t.

It’s sure hard to hold this sucker still.  Yes this camera creates very large 6×9 cm negatives but the problem is that to get sharp images you really need to use a tripod.  All of these shots suffer from some motion blur when you look close enough or if they were enlarged.  Also the fact that you only get 8 frames on a roll puts them in the $2 per exposure cost range.

Just a couple of images, one of which was the last on a roll of film as I walked to Lens and Shutter to drop it off for processing.  In the second image I love how the shrubs appear to be recoiling from the lone one on the other side of the line.  Sometimes to see possible images like this you need to envision the world as it might look in a photograph.  This is made easier when the subject is simple and appears to be in a single plane like this one, but really a photograph is ultimately shapes on paper.  Looking out in our three dimensional world and assessing it in two is hard work but the camera does not choose for you, it’s just the tool you use to do the conversion you can share.

“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” – Garry Winogrand

The circle in a square of the laundromat dryer came to mind when I saw this hub on an old loader.  It’s obviously been painted several different colours as well as the dark staining of dirt encrusted grease.  Up close there is actually a lot of interesting textures and I took a few digital images for a possible  future painting.  The filmwas a fresh pack from the fridge and you can see that it didn’t develop evenly on the bottom, I’ll have to wait until next week to find out if that is how all of them will now be.

Everything that can turn green around here seems to have.  And chlorophyll reflects infrared light very well resulting in a bright white pseudo snow when recorded with my camera in night shot mode.  I exaggerated the grain in Lightroom but see that it didn’t translate that well when down sampled to web size.

This pair of images represents the passage of 8 months.  I composed the second one from memory so it is off a bit but it still serves it’s purpose.  You can see that all evidence of the foundation is gone and even the house and garage from the first image have been removed.