‘Provoke: Between Protest and Performance’

It’s been almost three years since I unboxed Provoke, and I just finished reading all the text. It sat on the side table next to where I stare blankly at the television night after night, sometimes covered by some other book undergoing one of my casual reviews, sometimes by whatever recent-ish issue of Aperture that …

FilmLab, part 4: random

So… FilmLab. Honestly, it’s still early days for me with this software. Already, I’ve gone from “this is world-changing!” to “eh… I like my old process better” to… well, I don’t really know. FilmLab (version 2.0.1, anyway) is good for many things and not so good at some other things. What do I mean? Well, …

FilmLab, part 3: exposure, shmexposure

In my first experiences with FilmLab for MacOS, I noted that it tends to absolutely crush shadow areas in some situations. It also likes to blow out highlights, but with much less regularity than it crushes the shadows. I assumed this was due to my raw exposures and/or the negatives themselves. My historical set up …

FilmLab, part 2: enter the Wardflex

A month or so ago, my dad reached out to sell me some cameras: an Olympus Infinity 210, a plastic-fantastic panoramic-crop thing, a Minolta Freedom Vista panoramic-crop camera, and a Wardflex twin lens camera. I didn’t need any more cameras, but at the same time, I can’t resist a decent deal on some cameras I …

FilmLab, part 1: an hour at Beaver Lake

I last messed around with FilmLab back in 2017 when it was in beta and only on iPhones (and maybe Android, though I seem to recall there were problems with getting it ported to Android). I wasn’t particularly impressed, but I also wasn’t really doing it right and wasn’t convinced that a lowly phone could …