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Mika Lovely for The Jungle
🕑 Added 2019-11-07 21:51:58 +0000 UTCFor me creatively summer has been a time of struggle. A sunny forest can be green to the point that color correction is nearly impossible. Bright sunlight is contrast hell, the forests and parks are being enjoyed by thousands if not millions (fair enough the rest of the year I often find myself alone there), and instead of shooting all day I find myself doing the old photographer dance of waking up at the ass crack of dawn, and twiddling my fingers until sunset.
I don't really care about "golden hour." Nothing against it, but I like to shoot for more of the day than the sliver a plummeting sun affords us.
All my bitching aside. This summer I decided to fight back the urge to curse the sun, the warmth it brings, and "good weather," and instead experiment with finding slivers of the soft light I love the rest of the year, and when that failed go hard on soft focus in camera techniques that really cut down on the contrast.
This sort of came about because I noticed a weird thing when reviewing images for my upcoming 10 year retrospective for my series Into the Wild where even though I generally use the same settings in processing as winter faded into spring, and spring into summer my images became more and more contrasty. Organizing my photos chronologically I saw it year after year. Starting in May and ending around September it was nearly like watching a rising and falling graph of contrast where around late July and August they were just way too punchy.
Seeing that and realizing how many images were going to need a tweak before we could take the book to print was pretty eye opening, and while I can't really use a soft focus technique for Into the Wild as it would throw the series into a really weird place I decided that since The Jungle was already experimental, why not ramp it up.
I've already talked about using black stockings to get the soft focus effect I adore once this month, but I actually first used this technique years ago in Philadelphia with Mika Lovely for a shoot that maybe was going to be for Temperance, but ended up not fitting in. Those photos are still around on Patreon though and an be found here!
So when I through the black stocking on 4 years later Mika was stoked to see the return of the experiment she was originally a part of, and I think the results speak for themselves!
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