Lens-Artists Challenge, #330: Favourite Images of 2024
It’s a new year (Happy New Year, everyone) and the Lens-Artists Challenge is back after its Christmas break. This week we’ve been collectively asked by the Lens-Artists team to share our favourite photographs from the Challenges of last year. Since I only joined in with the Challenge in September I don’t have that many entries to choose from, but looking back I’ve discovered that’s still quite a lot of photos to go through.
My first favourite is a bit of a cheat, though I’m getting used to, shall we say, ‘flex’ the rules of the Challenge (*wink emoji*). My first favourite is from the last entry of the Lens-Artists Challenge from 2024, which is from the Last Chance Challenge: those Images that didn’t actually make it into one of the topics set during the year.
It’s from my first attempt at redscaling film, in this case Harman Phoenix. I had never tried this technique, where the film is exposed backwards through the support layer of the film, instead of directly to the emulsion. It came out great, and I’m determined to try it again this year.
My next favourite image was from our recent holiday to the Maldives. I’m a big fan of minimalist seascapes, even before I became aware of the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, and I try to take one of these whenever we go to the beach. This one came out just perfectly, and I really thought it encapsulated the topic of Silence.
The next couple are similar subjects, and are from the same Challenge, Beauty in Unexpected Places. The first is my favourite tree, a stacked multiple exposure taken with a noughties digicam with a failing sensor. This little beasties overexposes by about 10 stops and the only way to get a decent looking image is to use a variable ND filter.
The second was from our ‘main’ holiday. This year I brought along my full-spectrum Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ8 camera and tried a stacked multiple exposure of a tree near where to we were staying. It came out quite nicely, I thought.
My last favourite image is actually tinged with a little sadness now. For the past decade or more I’ve spent a lot of time walking through the woods behind our house, taking photos of the trees in different seasons and with different cameras. This image was taken on a windy day and is an infrared trichrome — what I call a digital aerochrome as it resembles the no longer available Kodak colour infrared film of the same name — of these woods.
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Sadly, just before Christmas I discovered that a huge swathe of the woods have been cut down to make way for new electricity pylons. I think this might be for additional power to the proposed new high speed train line between Aveiro (actually Madrid, but it’s going through Aveiro) to Lisbon. This will be nice, but it’s poor consolation for the loss of the woods.
Just recently I published a ‘manifesto‘ of my photography intentions for the coming year. As well as more redscale, obviously, I plan to be doing more work with extinct format cameras and films, like using 100-year-old cameras or the Rapid film system, which I’m getting really into at the moment. I’m also planning to do more glitch work, including techniques like intentional camera movement. This is a lot and it might interfere with my entries for the Lens-Artists Challenge, but I’m hoping to combine several projects and hopefully integrate the Challenge into these, too.
Next week, Anne from Slow Shutter Speed will be hosting the Challenge. Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here (https://photobyjohnbo.com/about-lens-artists/), and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
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