Love is Dead

I had just introduced Crash to what he's since termed "cryptography", or graveyard photography, introduced to *me* in 1994 or so by ihalo photographer Patrick Woodruff.

Part of a craft project to develop our own slides, we used a film noted for producing rich colors. Throughout the shoot, Crash would note the endless grey tombstones and snicker at me.

I saw this tombstone and snapped a photo of it, just in case I once again didn't come up with anything else for my annual holiday greeting card.

Lameness predictably got the better of me. I found myself using Plan B without ever developing a Plan A. However, I had never dealt with getting reprints off of slides before. And hadn't left enough time for that sort of thing. So I brought the slides to a potluck and asked folks if they had any better ideas... or better yet, access to scanners and color printers and the like.

Rich, a grad student at the MIT Media Lab, said he could probably use the state-of the art facilities for it. However, he'd prefer to somehow make it applicable to his course work as well... part of which included developing, well, for the sake of comprehension, let's just say "filters". Go to his website and see what I mean: www.media.mit.edu/~rich.

However, he noted, he was unable to get the screen color quality onto paper, and past experience suggested the best solution would be to shoot prints by taking pictures of the screen, the old fashioned way, with a tripod and cloth to hide the glare. Since he was more experienced with this, I had him set up the shoot. However, he was unfamiliar with my camera's quirks and didn't always succeed in framing the image properly. Some of this year's postcards show bits of computer desktop/windows and the like. I was able to get most of that trimmed by the nice folks at Motophoto.

The results were variously used for this year's valentine. Rich and I both prefer the image shown here, although I didn't come to that conclusion until I had multiple copies of the two that were more popular at first glance.