Lens: Voigtlander color-skopar 35mm f2.5
Camera: NEX-7, ISO800, f2.5, 1/60, raw
I love textures. They give an extra level of interpretation to an image by strongly engaging tactile feelings on the observer. They make a photograph more solid, more material. So I like shooting through objects in order to add their textures to the photograph. I like reflections, see-through, and I like the ground-glasses of old optical-benches, with their extremely vignetted, highly-textured and low-res representation of reality. My in-laws have a super old optical-bench, it’s all but functional due to light leaks almost from everywhere (cracks in the wood and cuts in the bellows) but its ground-glass is great in displaying a ghostly version of reality. So today I set-up a little scene, with a table lamp, a black background, and I shot it through the optical-bench, focusing on the ground-glass picture. Lots of lovely textures, both from the wood and from the glass. The lamp seems to emerge from darkness, almost as drew on a blackboard.
Maybe some will ask why I bother so much with all these old stuff just to get some texture I could have easily added in post-production with photoshop, or event straight away with an iPhone. The answer may sound geek or pretentious, but I happen to love analogue textures and I hate digital textures. It is not a digital vs. analogue dispute, it is my general view on post-production. It should be used to emphasize the qualities of a shot, and it should be used as much as possible for this goal, but it shouldn’t add things which weren’t in the picture from the beginning.
I mean, I can appreciate how adding things sometimes makes a shot look better, more interesting, how with some digital textures, for example, a post-production can provide that tactile feeling I was talking about in the opening. But whenever I find out that those textures, frames, or whatever else, were digitally added to a shot, well, I feel like cheated, a feeling I dislike, so I tend to dislike the shot as well.