I’m focusing on scanning my negatives today. High resolution scans can take a long time (about one hour per set of twelve) but once they’re done, I’ll be able to print them at larger sizes. I’ll have the option of printing them digitally or through an analogue process in the darkroom. For now I’ve printed some lower resolution copies so I can see what I’m working with. I’m thinking about my original aims and attempting to group the images in a way that makes a cohesive ‘story’.
There are a few different avenues I want to explore with this project. Firstly, I want to highlight the pleasure of roaming. I want to connect the viewer to their own memories through a feeling of nostalgia. To do this, I’ve tried photographing scenes that might feel familiar or universally recognisable, perhaps unlocking sensory memories- things that might have been enjoyable in childhood like feeding the ducks, jumping in puddles or walking on crunchy leaves. I also tried using expired film hoping that the faded colours and low contrast quality of the film will give a visual feeling of nostalgia.
Secondly, I wanted to visually capture the act of walking. I tried to compose photos that would give a sense of depth, and a feeling that a path is stretching out in front of you. I think the composition of the black and white set above does this effectively. If I level out the contrast on them so it’s more comparable between them, they might work well together.
I also experimented with capturing multiple exposures on the same frame, walking between them, to show the differences in the landscape as I walked. These ones didn’t necessarily give a sense of following a route as I expected, perhaps because there’s no visible path as a focal point, but I like the result. In the photograph with the pylons, I enjoy the way the landscape appears layered and the way my change in perspective had changed the scale of the objects. I also like the way this set appear more abstracted and there is a theme of lines created by nature.
In the two images below, the film is very grainy and colours very faded, but it gives the images a more abstract and painterly feel, where expression is prioritised over realism. They could look impactful if printed in a larger format, however since the graininess would be very apparent, it would be best to use a surface with an uneven texture.
