Remember thirty (?) years ago when CDs were “new?” Old albums were re-released as digitally remastered. Yeah, I’m old. I’m going to borrow that term for my next couple of photographic projects. The two projects are “The Fifty Project” and “Hong Kong Bird and Flower Markets.” The Fifty Project was created for my fiftieth birthday and was a collection of my fifty best photographs as a pdf book on a CD. The images were scanned from gelatin silver prints at relatively low resolution. While it was a great project at that time, the presentation has not aged well because of advances in technology. We now have better (and bigger) monitors, faster internet connections and large capacity hard drives. Everything that constrained us to small file sizes is gone. It is possible to remake an old project match our original vision.
It may be apocryphal, but Ansel Adams made negatives he knew he couldn’t print at the time he made the exposure because the papers and developers weren’t capable of producing the results he visualized. He needed the technical world to catch up with his vision. Apparently, the opposite is now true. I’m trying to catch up to the advances in technology.
After working on my process to digitally remaster these selected film negatives, I’m kind of wondering what will happen when I start to dig into all my film negatives. I know I will find great memories, but the question is will the photographs be as great as the memories?
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