Not everything we attempt turns out exactly the way we planned.

What I thought would be a good idea at the beginning of this week, wasn’t. In fact, it was an absolute disaster and being the rather stubborn-minded person I am I didn’t give up on the concept until the end of business on Wednesday. By that time, it was too late to shoot anything new for this week. There is a lesson to be learned here, but I’d probably flunk the test. I really wanted that concept to work and am disappointed that it failed so miserably.

Fortunately, one of the advantages of having worked with digital images the past 15 years is that we have an archive to which we can turn in moments like this. For this week, I dropped back to another rather experimental art project from eight years ago. These images were originally shot in February of 2012, using only a single lightbulb as illumination in a basement with a red floor (which tinted everything) and white concrete block walls. The nature of the original project, though, was such that those factors didn’t matter a great deal. Here are a few samples from that project.

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The posing limits imposed on that project were rather severe, so to come back to them eight years later and try to do something different makes the original concept feel rather limited. Because of that, I’ve chosen to not crop the new work. Instead, I left everything at its original ratio so that there would be plenty of room to play. In a couple of cases, that resulted in the model looking a bit as though she’s hanging out in the middle of space. While that’s not the best look possible, in the experimental sense it is not the worst sin committed.

I also didn’t use exactly the same processes on all the images. This is because certain processes blended better than others and as I didn’t have an extra 50 hours to do a full set getting some differentiation between images felt important.

Blending the processes was more of a challenge this week than it has been with others. There was a lot of posterization as the colors interacted. While there are plenty of people who like that effect, I tend to not be one of them, and I re-worked a couple of images to avoid getting as severe an effect.

All this reminds me that this is very much an experimental series. We try different things from week to week and sometimes they don’t work. This was one of those weeks. We learn as we go and hopefully can apply what we learned to the next set of photos.

Here is the limited collection from this week’s experiments. Click on a thumbnail to view the image full screen.

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