{looking back} bricks and things

Do you ever look back on something you created, such as photographs, and find that you like them better than you did before? At the time I took these polaroids, over five years ago, I thought they were okay. I liked them but didn't think they were anything special. Now, I kind of love them.

What generates the change in perspective? The time that passed? Or my own change in aesthetic preference? Or did I just need to get away from them, not look at them in hopes of something better until one day I stumble upon them again and they are better simply because I forgot what I was going for in the first place? My memory being wiped of whatever my preconceived notion was?

Regardless, I love them and the feeling they give me. All that old brick... it was such a neat place! Taken in Danville, Virginia. March 2006.

{looking back} summer triptych

Polaroids from when my fiancé (then boyfriend) and I went to The Morikami Museum & Japanese Gardens in Boca Raton, Florida, and The Holocaust Memorial in Miami, Florida.

Summer 2008. That Summer.

{looking back} before and after

Back in college I learned photography on a 4x5 large format camera. We would shoot on 4x5 transparency film, but first we had to set up the shot, meter the lighting and then test it on polaroids before taking the final exposure. We only had one chance to get it right: if the lighting was wrong or something was off, we had to change it and hope it was correct for the final shot which we would be graded on. It was absolutely awful at the time, stressing out and running out of time...

But part of me misses those days. Looking back, there was more of a process to taking a picture instead of just shooting until it looks good.

I think I would enjoy it more now. I would have more than just four hours (believe me, four hours goes by extremely fast) to shoot and I could really play with the lighting and have a chance to explore the camera, something I never really got to do because we were always rushing to meet deadlines. I could shoot more now instead of just the required assignment; 4x5 polaroids, transparency film and developing was extremely expensive, even more so for a poor college kid.

Below are the final results. (I have a fondness for the fish picture because it was my very first attempt at shooting it. I ended up having to reshoot for some reason and my second attempt was with a Canon 5D. I like how it evolved in stages, from a very basic and simple black & white polaroid, to color transparency film, to a digital file, and then the final result with all the retouching.)

The orchids picture also has a story behind reshooting it - though not a very happy one. A fellow student acted as my assistant on the shoot and he was the one to load the film. But it ended up that he'd loaded the film backwards, resulting in a dim, ghostly red image instead of vibrant color. So I had to book studio time, check out equipment (funnily enough, my now fiancé was the check out guy!), reshoot, find someone I barely knew to drive me to the photo lab to get it developed in time for class the next day. And I still got a bad grade for turning it in 15 minutes late because a friend had to go pick it up from the lab for me because I had other classes beforehand.

Yeah, photography classes were pretty awful sometimes.