Twigonometry
Bozeman, Montana
2023
This is actually a redo of a triptych I made way back in 2001. It features the same snowbound broken twig photographed from three different angles. The photos were taken with a cheap film camera and then scanned on a cheap scanner. I couldn’t retake the photos but I rescanned them with my current scanner (a way better piece of equipment than the one I had 22 years ago). I originally called the piece Twig Geometry but the Fashion Queen suggested Twigonometry. Sometime during the last 22 years, I came around to liking her choice of titles better.
Are you scanning with a dedicated scanner or using your digital camera to copy film? If a scanner, what is the new model?
Cool set of images, btw. Wish there was an effective way to display them all together as a real triptych.
I’m scanning with a dedicated scanner, an Epson Perfection V850 Pro. It was “new” to me two years ago, but even they had not been manufacturing them for quite some time. I looked for new alternatives but there didn’t seem to be any, except for really, really serious scanners that are way bigger bucks than I wanted to spend. I’ve never tried just using my camera to copy film, although I’ve read about it. One advantage of the dedicated scanner is I can scan multiple negatives at a time, something that was important to me as I used the covid lockdown time to sift through my rather large collection of slide film, discarding much and scanning the rest.
Those triptych images are, in this case, posted the same way I’ve printed, matted and framed them, i.e., stacked vertically. You can of course display images “all together as a real triptych” as you said by combining them in Photoshop with appropriate borders etc. and then posting them as a single image. (With white borders and a white background on my blog post I will usually put a dark outline on the triptych image to distinguish it from the blog background.) I’ve done that in the past but this time went for the quick and easy way.
Thanks for sharing your process and tools. Being able to copy more than one image at a time is a real time saver, something that can’t be done with the digital camera method.
Point taken about this triptych. I still like it! 🙂