While I was shooting the roll of Cinestill 400 on my Pentax K-1000, I also started shooting a roll of Ilford Delta 400 on my Olympus Pen EE-3.
This was a 24 exposure roll that I received as a gift, and as with the other 24 exposure roll I received as a gift, I forgot it was only 24 exposures.
Well, 48 in this case, since the Pen EE-3 is a half-frame camera.
I mention that I forgot because it impacted the artistic experiment I undertook with this film.
And that artistic experiment?
For every shot I take, turn around and take another shot in the opposite direction. With the ultimate goal being to display them side-by-side, which is also known as a diptych.
An artist I follow here makes great use of diptyches, and so I thought I’d try my hand at it.
(Please don’t let my efforts on this front detract from others’ use of the art form.)
The other nice thing about this experiment is that the Pen EE-3 is fully automatic and fixed focus, so I don’t have to go to all the trouble of recording my exposure settings for each shot, and if the exposure is terrible, well, it’s not my fault, it’s the camera’s!
And not to knock the artistic merit of the diptych, but I’m hoping the format (two pictures) and constraint (180 degrees apart) will make the viewer more forgiving of my compositional skills.
Plus, after having experimented with a number of different film emulsions, I’ve decided I’m not a huge fan of Delta 400. So to get myself to shot this roll with any kind of enthusiasm, I had to do something different from my usual approach.
Shake things up a bit
I guess we’ll see if it worked.
In the end, it turns out it the whole opposite, 180 degree thing didn’t always work. So in some of these images, I took some artistic license (less than 180 degrees, or, if even that didn’t make sense, two pictures with the same theme / object).
Basically, I started out with rules and then broke them as I saw fit.
So in this series, I will share the ones that turned out, well, not embarrassingly awful.
And for those of you who earn their living in the diptych market, you can relax. I’m clearly not serious competition.
Not yet, anyway…
Next time: Homeless dipytches! Down by the creek!
ian m dudley 