Impulse

I used to think that solar­iza­tion was just some goofy tech­nique pho­tog­ra­phers used to show how cool they are in the dark­room. (The process of gen­er­at­ing these in a dark­room is tedious and dif­fi­cult on a good day). Then, Ron Hammond said some­thing clever while pre­sent­ing Forgotten but not Gone, “Solarization is won­der­ful when the image is all about shape.” A light went off in my head.

Back in ’02, I tried repeat­edly to shoot pho­tos of the land-orca fins of Magnuson Park here in Seattle. I was never happy with the results. I could not cap­ture the oth­er­world­li­ness of the place (it really does feel like you’re amidst a pod of sub­ter­ranean whales).
Enter Ron’s inspi­ra­tion. About 30 sec­onds in pho­to­shop later and I had a photo that much bet­ter cap­tured the mood of the place, far bet­ter than any­thing I had pre­vi­ously taken.
Since then, I’ve been wan­der­ing around shoot­ing things with solar­iza­tion in mind. I think there’s some­thing here. They’re dark and moody. They do empha­size shape. But, I haven’t quite got it worked out yet.
The first thing I’ve learned is that a nice, medium-contrast photo is best. It gives you more planes of tone to play with. My first idea had been to shoot high con­trast stuff — Gasworks Park at sun­set — since I wanted the end result to be very con­trasty. Not so. The images were too dif­fi­cult to manip­u­late because the tones were com­pressed at the ends — either nearly white or nearly black. What would’ve been much nicer is to have a nice Gaussian bell-curve for a his­togram — medium con­trast with smooth grad­u­a­tions between tones. The smooth curve makes it much eas­ier to con­trol what falls in which final tonal range.
Anyway, here are my first exper­i­ments. What do you think?