Here is a series of photos I have been working on. I was walking with my wife last month (October, 2014) in the Cobb Lake Unit of the Wellington State Wildlife Area, near our home in Fort Collins, Colorado. This is a very small area of wetlands favored by a variety of migratory birds. I was struck by the number of spent shotgun shell casings littering the ground throughout the area. They are everywhere, so the quantity was surprising, but the colors were also very striking. Muscular colors, though some have faded in the sun. I picked up as many as I could fit in my pockets, just to remove litter from this beautiful natural area. The next 2 days I visited with my 120S pinhole camera. You can see info about this camera by searching on f295. Try here. I walked around, photographed many shells, and collected and labeled the shells that I got.
My goal in this series is to represent my cognitive dissonance between the beauty of the shells vs. their deadly purpose and the fact that they are littering the beautiful natural area.
These images were shot on Kodak Tri-X film, 120 size. The exposures were all in the range of 2 to 6 seconds, counted off in my head. I developed in HC110 at dilution H. I scanned the negatives, then cropped, spotted, and adjusted levels/curves in Photoshop. To accurately portray the colors of the shells I photographed each shell or pair of shells using a digital point and shoot, but with a white balance card in the shot to help with color fidelity. Then in Photoshop I converted each B&W file to color, and added layers for each color I would add. I then hand colored those layers using the colors sampled from the digital reference images. You can see the results below.
I’m taking the liberty of posting 12 photos (there are more in the series), because of my intention to show the diversity of the shell casings.
Enjoy.
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