Featured An odd-looking photo

Back in the late ‘70s, a friend of mine was showing me color slides he had taken on a trip to Algonquin Park. Fresh back from the processor, he hadn’t even seen them yet and was entirely dismissive when this showed up – clearly a bad shot. But I liked it. So he had a print made.

This was a big deal at the time. A professional processor photographed the slide to produce a medium format negative (called an internegative) from which the positive print was produced.

I put it away, knew where it was, but it was put away for decades, packed in a box with my own photo negs in a cool dry place with no sunlight. Recently I disinterred the box and was shocked to see how it looked. Over the years it had turned red.



Fortunately, thinking me crazy and having no interest in the photo himself, he had given me the whole caboodle – print, internegative, and slide. The internegative also looks very red, but the color on the slide looked good, so I took it into the library, where the necessary modern technology is available, and scanned the slide.



I still think it’s a cool looking image, and I’m not entirely sure how he got the effect. It’s blurred, but not the way photos are usually blurred. It’s more like it”s fragmented, crumbled, shard-like. I think maybe camera motion with a very slow shutter speed, almost like a time-exposure.



It might be an accidental image, but I do like the effect.

 

I like it. It looks like a painting.

 

Yes. It's very painterly.

 

I like it too. Almost like a detail of a butterfly wing.

 

I think you're right... camera Shake.... slow shutter speed ...plus wide open aperture... plus the focus being on something really close when the subject is far away... plus the natural lighting situation plus the bokeh characteristics of whatever lens was on his camera. I like it too. I have a couple shots in this genre... accidental out of focus pictures of my own that I somewhat like

 

Wow, it's definitely a unique and fascinating image. Love it, even if I could only guess at the way the result was obtained!