April 1, 2009 - Old Chair

Day 1 of this project! The past few days were pretty hard for me as I wanted to start this project really badly. I bought my camera 4 months ago and had a lot of fun with it. I’ve read a lot of tutorials, books and I’ve been shooting a lot of photo’s. I think I’m more than ready for this project!

The weather couldn’t be better today. The sun was shining and there were only few clouds in the sky. A perfect day to spend outside! I didn’t have all day to take pictures though. I still have a pile of homework waiting for me. But I did manage to shoot some photo’s! As I was sitting in the backyard with my laptop I noticed an old chair just standing on our balcony. I knew it from when I was just a little kid (i’m 18 now). The chair must’ve been there for quite some time.. I decided to make some pictures of it so I went upstairs and checked it out. The hardest part was finding a good background though. The first pictures I made were on the balcony itself where I used the wall as background. I made some pictures on the grass, next to our house and in the front yard. The photo I’ve chosen for today was taken on the balcony. It was the best of them In my opninion, but it needed something more.

Back in the old days photo’s where made with analogue camera’s, a 35mm film and some chemicals in a dark room. I’ve never done this (but I most certainly will sometime) but I’ve seen it in books and movies. When you use the wrong chemicals when developing a negative (or slide) the colours become very unnatural. This is called Cross Processing. I saw some photo’s wich were developed like this a little while ago and really liked the style, so I searched about it on the internet and found a really nice tutorial. This tutorial showed me how to edit your digital photo in photoshop as if it was cross processed. I’ve tried it out on some old photo’s and it worked really good. So I decided to use it on my chair photo too. After applying these effects I added some layers to darken the image and bring out the detail of the wall.

I’m not exactly sure what the end result is since the sun is blocking my screen al day. (I haven’t been inside yet). But from what I can see out here it looks pretty decent so I’m statisfied for today.

Edit:I’m inside now and the photo doesn’t really look like I wanted it to. I knew that the sun blocked my view, but I didn’t know that it was this bad.. I’ve tried to make a better edition:

Even the edit doesn’t look like the photo I wanted to make. I’ll just have to try some more for this. I’ve created a photo of my cat a little while ago wich looks better. I didn’t really use the exact Cross Processing colour technique but it does look a lot better.