This image contains the first photograph I ever made with my new 4x5 camera, way back in 1993. I had been carrying this worn conch shell with two tiny scallops wedged inside since about 1973. Gail and I, married at the time, were driving down Highway One in a 1968 Volkswagen Squareback, camping along the way, and picked up a couple who were hitchhiking somewhere on the coast of Northern California. They were on their way to Los Angeles, which I intended to pass through on my way to Mexico, and we got along, so we traveled together for a couple of days. Gail had to get back to work, so we left her at the Greyhound station in Santa Barbara. It was one of the hitchhikers who picked up the shell in question at the beach at Montana de Oro, and then left it, along with a bag full of other treasures (all of which I still have), in the back of the Volkswagen.
When I bought the 4x5 camera, I knew I finally had the equipment to do the shell justice. I immediately ran into problems, however, in getting the right exposure. I was using Kodak Tri-X professional film, which is rated at ASA 320, but when I took what should be the right exposure, there was nothing on the film. I kept lengthening the exposure until I had the negative I wanted, but only after that did I discover that I had misread the written instructions on inserting the film into the holder and had been putting it in backwards. It is possible to get a good negative by exposing through the anti-halation backing on the film, but it takes a very long time. I had put the time to good use, however, by using it to add extra light to the two wedged-in shells with a Mini Mag-lite.
With my primitive lighting set-up, it took a lot of burning with custom-made matt-board masks to get the final print, which, four years later, I scanned into Photoshop to use in the composition here:
Two In One Suspended:
If you read the description of "Eve's Last Bowls Singing", first, you may recognize the pattern in this image, and have a grasp of the technique for producing it. I used the Free Transform tool in Photoshop to get the perspective effect, used the lasso with about a 3-pixel Feather to draw the shape of the shadow, which I then filled with transparent foreground, also used to vary the lighting on the sides of the "frame". The most time-consuming part was using the Quick Mask feature to eliminate the original background in the shell photo. I used the same commercial facilities to get from the digital image to the finished print.
