Spring Dreams

a wonderfully haunting image

Thanks, Brian.

 

I was lucky as the little girl (daughter of a photographer friend) was in a pensive mood during a picnic with her family beneath the apple blossoms. She made the photo and was quite uaware of my presence most of the time. The print here is a bit dark (the shadows), and it is better when I print it a bit lighter (the Konica IR film is naturally a bit contrasty and hard to tame, but gives nice tones in the vegetation. Too bad it is no longer made).

 

I like very much your own people shots.

I appreciate your comment on this. My thought when I opened it, before reading what you wrote, was how beautiful the vegetation looks but that I wish I got a little more from her eyes. So now I assume the print allows me into those eyes a bit more. The whole mood is quite extraordinary and it's amazing to me that she could either be a sweet angel or the bad seed, an enigmatic expression for sure. Some of that may be in the blackness of her eyes. There's an otherworldly character to this that I respond to. Very nice.

Fred, you have it right on about the eyes and also about the enigmatic expression of the little girl. Although the darkness of the eyes might add a little to the mystery, they should be lighter as you say, as they vehicle her faraway dreamy look. I struggled printing this one and have tried considerably lighter tones in the dress, which seems to help in adding to the slightly ethereal nature of the image. And lighter eyes work well, too. The eyes require dodging with small pieces of paper on a coat hanger wire.

 

It's fun how one can modify an image and change the effect. This is part of the pleasure of post production, isn't it, whether done in the lightroom or darkroom.

A photo of a darkroom print, reproduced darker here than I wanted. The little girl was

not very concerned about being photographed.