0503 nascence & glitchy photography

0503 nascence

For a long time I've been interested in what digital cameras do to when struggling with low light conditions. The artifacts it produces sometimes look similar to visual white noise on an old TV, but it's not produced in the same way. When a digital camera zooms in to something it can't quite make out, these blotchy approximations, to me, are similar to what our imagination does when we can't quite hear something clearly. For example, when we are in the shower, and music is playing at a level too low to make out what it is, with all the noise from the shower and the bathroom reverb, our brains seem to fill in gaps in the information and we "imagine" a piece of music that is surprisingly different that what is actually playing. When we turn off the water, the music leaps into focus and the illusory music vanishes.

In the 90s for a time I went through a photography phase. I had an old SLR and bought a couple of lenses and a monopod on Ebay. I did some reading and found that high ISO film was good for shooting in low light, but that I should expect a grainy result. This attracted me bc I love photos with lots of grain. So I took my camera out at night and experimented with shutter speeds, apertures, and 3200(?) ISO B&W film I got from a camera store. After a ton of disappointing results coming back from the developer, I took my camera into a rock club. I was glad I had a monopod bc it didn't take up much space and was easy to move my setup around. There were dancing drunk people all over the place after all. These shots were the best successes I had. I didn't shoot the band much. What interested me were the faces of the goers enjoying the music and having a good time. I set up close to the stage, off to the side and got the camera up as high as I could and shot down at clusters of people. I had a bunch of faces in each frame and I loved the many stories and feelings captured in each frame. No flash, of course. That would pull everyone out of the moment I wanted to shoot, and probably get me kicked out. When those came back from the developer I was super pleased with the results. I stuck with B&W low light especially when my friends came over and drank, etc. For some reason I left all that stuff with other people when I moved to Korea, and then digital photography became affordable, then ubiquitous, then smartphones had it. Now I'm back at it and that grainy aesthetic still intrigues me, even though it's generally considered crummy photography, I like to use it to generate more abstract images and video that (to me anyway) is more interesting than portraits. Give me a cloudy, amorphous trembling blob on an undulating field of blotchy chaos any day.