Serendipitous Discoveries
by chris cunningham
Renaissance Faire, 1992
A long time ago I went out shooting with a friend of mine. Back then with film cameras some of them you hand cranked the film back into the canister. At least with my Nikon you had too. Accidently I didn’t crank one of the rolls all the way back and the tongue of the film was still sticking out. I set the rolls aside and a short time later a group of us kiddies were heading out to the Faire in Devore. I grabbed the supposedly unused roll, and some other transparency film, and shot away. When I got that roll back I was looking at it on the light table and I had one of the most amazing rolls of film I’d ever seen. All these cool texures, face and colors. I knew what had happened, but sometimes you just get really lucky. Double exposures, it’s so old school.
Now that I have a proper scanner, I can finally give my old negs and chromes some decent scans.
these are really strong, *more* please
As double exposure was used as a surrealist device (Maurice Tabard, Man Ray etc) that certainly is old school, and may be why the lower image is reminds me of a cadavre ?ɬ©squis.
I think allowing time for stuff like this (collaborating with chance?) is a good antidote to becoming too involved in carefully composing shots, lighting, exposure lalala to the point where perhaps creativity is stifled worrying about getting the techie side right. I never worried about that in art school, the idea and image by whatever experimental means was the main thing… although I am more concerned about the technical side now, its important to not overgeek to the point of losing sight of that imho
Thanks!
Ahhhh… life was so pure back in art school.
I remember shooting 10 rolls of film completely out of focus because I was so enamored with how the rainy streets and twinkly city lights of San Francisco looked when all bokeh’d up. When I turned in these really huge colorful prints the professor said, “These are all out of focus?” Well yeah… is that wrong? It seemed so right at the moment but when he questioned me on it I crumbled.
I still do it to this day… showed him!
this is so good… yup, very lucky…