Fire Eater

[cooltouch]

This image has a lot of my commentary associated with it. Normally, I don't comment heavily on one of my images, but I've always felt this one was an exception because of its history, if you will. Okay, so here's the original. Pretty unspectacular, right?



This photo was taken at a luau I attended in Hawaii in 1984. The outfit was a Canon A-1, FD 50mm f/1.8, and Canon 188A flash. The film was Kodachrome 64. Back then, I knew how to put my camera in "P" mode, how to set the flash to "Auto," how to turn the focusing ring, and that was about it. The only reason why I was shooting Kodachrome 64 was because I'd discovered slide film several months before, and really liked the results a lot more than print film. But it was partly due to all this ignorance that the photo came out as good as it did.

Say what?

Ever since I got that photo back from the developer, I was intrigued at the way the fire eater turned out. But a couple of years went by before I finally understood why. See that big shiny bald head and the blonde hair and the floodlight in the foreground? Well, the flash hit those shiny objects, and reacted to them instead of the subject, causing them to be exposed correctly but the fire eater to be under exposed. But this under exposure was a blessing as it turned out.

Fast forward a couple of years. By then I owned an FTb, a couple of F-1s, and a brace of Canon gear, including an autobellows with slide duplicator attachment. I decided I'd try a bit of duping and cropping on this otherwise only marginally interesting slide. This was the result:



Good thing the original was Kodachrome. There was enough detail in that small bit of the original to make an acceptable enlargement. I actually kinda like the grain, and the apparent softer focus just doesn't really matter to me. For the dupe, I bought some of Kodak's special slide duplicating film, and also bought some Kodachrome 25, which I had read was also popular for dupes. Did the whole prefogging thing with the K25, and all, and I have to admit that it all came out pretty well. It was a rather long and laborious process, though, what with all the homework and exposure bracketing, etc.

Much more recently, I've gone back and retraced my footsteps. I made a digital dupe of the original cropped dupe, using an Opteka digital slide duplicator and my Canon XS DSLR. Then I made a cropped dupe of the original slide, using a T-mount zoom slide duplicator, also with my Canon XS. And then I compared all three -- the original old-school dupe, which was scanned at 4800 dpi using my Epson 4990, the Opteka dupe of the original cropped dupe, and the zoom duplicator dupe of the original slide. And you know what? There wasn't really any significant difference between any of them. Huh.

Depending on which image I select, it's possible to play some with exposure, and not surprisingly, this works best with dupes or scans of the orignal slide, but ultimately, by the time I've got exposure the way I like it best, I'm right back where I started. It's all good, I suppose.

[Olivier]

Beautiful image, Michael.

When I looked at the first one, I thought that the fire eater was in water...