Saturday, August 21, 2021

The Guitar Player

Way back when I was still a novice at photography, I took a photo of a friend playing guitar, sitting on the hood of my father's car.  Probably spring on 1977.  I was trying to do some cool lighting, with the sun reflecting off the guitar.  This would've been my first SLR (Canon-TX), all manual.  Almost certainly Kodak Tri-X film, developed and printed in my basement.  Well, you can see from the scan below, it was all a bit beyond my capabilities at the time.  But not so bad that I didn't keep a print of it.


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Fast forward 44 years or so, and I came across the print while digging through old photos.  I was looking for :throwback" photos for my Instagram account.  I decided to scan it (as seen above), and see what I could do in Photoshop (Elements).  Below is an improved version, mostly just adjusting Layers.  But I did have to do some burning to try and fix the somewhat clunky dodging I did on the print:



Much improved, I think.  I wish I had easy access to the negative, it could be interesting to start over from there and see what I could do.  I probably do have the negative, in a box with every other negative from those days.

I sent a copy of the photo to the guy in the picture.  I haven't seen him since the late 70's, but had a couple of email correspondences earlier this century.  For now, though, he's anonymous here.



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