Russia and Denmark Urban Mirages Images

The four latest additions to my Urban Mirages series:


Børsen, Copenhagen


Hermitage, St Petersburg


Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, St Petersburg


Peterhof Palace, St Petersburg

The Ominous City Hall

Latest addition to my Urban Mirages series, the Big Brother-esque city hall building in Toronto. I thought puke yellow was a good colour for the sky?

Totems

A new addition to my Urban Mirages series. Tourists staring at the Totem Poles in Stanley Park.

Urban Mirages

New images from my recent trip for my Urban Mirages series (formerly Public Clocks). This project examines urban and touristic landscapes, using red, green and blue filters on black and white film to create colour images. The process was developed by the early 20th century Russian photographer Prokudin-Gorskii, and is adapted here to emphasize the chaos of modern urban scenery. It is also an inquiry into why people gather in certain places.

Vegas Clocks

A couple of contributions to my RGB clock project that I took in and near Las Vegas in December. More to come.

YVR

Granville Island Market RGB

Shot it on my lunch break.

Skytrain and Mt Pleasant Clocks

More Clock Images

Public Clocks

This is the beginning of a new project I'm working on about public clocks and how they are regarded, ignored, appreciated, becoming irrelevant, etc. I am using the Prokudin-Gorskii process and emphasizing different parts of the red, green and blue images to give a sense of temporality, like the people passing by are ghosts as the time passes.

RGB Berlin

I made a few more attempts on my trip in Europe at creating the Prokudin-Gorskii effect. As a reminder, that is when you take three black and white pictures of the same thing, each with red, green and blue filters on the lens respectively. Then, in post-production, you convert each picture, or layer, into a duotone image of the colour of filter it had, and sandwich the three together. This theoretically yields a colour image. I'm still, however, not ending up with images that are very vibrant at all. It could be I'm not getting the exposure quite right on all of the images. Maybe I'll try it again another time.
Any thoughts on this image? Intriguing or dull?

Scots Bay Prokudin-Gorskii

Another Prokudin-Gorskii composite, this time of the beach in Scots Bay, Nova Scotia. I used regular B/W film instead of infrared film, but I'm still not pleased with the results. I want to try to get much more vibrant colours using this technique. Will try again.

Prokudin-Gorskii continued...

So here are my first "serious" images from my Prokudin-Gorskii experiment with infrared film. I'm a bit underwhelmed. Wish I could get brighter colours out of them. (For some reason they come out very purple??) I think I will try again with regular B/W film, because it seems to come out brighter. I'd like to try one seascape as the sky gets darker in the evening, and one city scene at night. See what those look like.


By the way, here is the link once again to the original work that inspired what I am playing with here:
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html

Prokudin-Gorskii Experiment Works!

I tried again to make colour images out of 3 b/w images, as I had tried to do once in the summer. This time it works! My results are still very messy, but clear enough to see how I can proceed to make better ones. The first one is infrared film, though very underexposed. The second is regular b/w film (the developing of which I messed up due to trying to use a developing tank I found without a lid). I am going to try both b/w and infrared again, next time much more perfect.

A New Way of Looking at Colour Photography

A few weeks ago, I found this amazing body of work by Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who took colour photographs of Russia around 1909-1912. How is that done? Have a look at the link:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html

I wondered if I could do it myself, and with infrared film. First time, fail. Next time better.