What was lacking the last couple of weeks was inspiration. Not being inspired is a scary place to be in for an artist. I was constantly asking myself where my motivation had gone and was wondering how to get it back.

One evening I was walking back home from the subway station after having spent another unmotivated hour and a half at the gym. I found a beautiful Gingko Biloba leaf on the sidewalk and took it home with me. I put it on a sheet of printer paper lit it with the light I have on my computer desk and snapped a picture of it with the little point and shoot camera that I have been carrying around with me since the beginning of the year.

I was inspired. I pulled out my Mamiya RZ medium format camera, got some chrome film out of the fridge and bought some Polaroid. I called my roommate Nieves who came back the next day from her country house and asked her to bring me some leaves from her garden.

I have been shooting leaves. I had completely forgotten the old ways of doing this. This is the first time I shoot film in two years. For years all of my clients have been wanting digital images. Shooting film feels similar to when I started shooting with digital cameras. There is a sense of excitement. There is also the not knowing part. Did I expose everything right? Well, the only way to find this out is to run the film at the lab. Shooting film also gives me a brake from the computer and keeps me from overshooting since processing is really expensive.

The downside of this is of course that the images will end up in the computer at the certain point what means that I will have to spend time in front of a computer scanning them.

There seems to be no escape. But I am willing to pay that price of Polaroids; processing and scanning for the superior quality I get working that way and the ability to do things in a new way even though it is really the old way.

I will post some of the shots as soon as I have them in a digital form.

 

 

 

"Inspiration" Williamsburg/Brooklyn/Ginkgo Biloba Leaf 11-16-08 at 06:51 PM

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Please check out my website at carstenfleck.com

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