Norway to Philly via Utah

I randomly found this pic on Flickr last week and was immediately fascinated by the red and yellow splotches of color. At first when I saw the thumbnail, I thought they were fireworks but that wouldn't make sense since it was the daytime. Were these light leaks, are they a result of a double exposure, or is this from damage to the photo? I wasn't sure, but it didn't matter. I marked it as a favorite and gave a simple comment.

Then the other day, I get a message from the poster, Emily. She saw that I was taking photos in Philly and asked if she knew me, seeing that she lived here up until about 2 years ago. So then I look through her photos and finally put it all together. Turns out I was seeing her friend about 2 years back and we had hung out a bunch at shows, bars and backyard BBQs. How crazy small this little blue sphere is. It's not like I was looking at photos by friends of friends. It was totally random. None of the photos are even tagged. Pretty neat.

Anyway, you should really check out this set. Not only are the photos and colors amazing, but the way these were transferred to digital adds a lot to the character and composition. It's all slide film that was shot by Emily's mom in the late 60's and since she didn't have a slide scanner, she held the slides in front of an incandescent bulb and took a photo with a digital camera. For the most part, you would never know but on some slides with a lot of white space, you can actually see the imprint on the light bulb. On other photos, the bulb is used more to highlight an area of the photo, adding a new compositional element to the old forgotten slides.

This has totally inspired me as my dad has cases and cases of old slides from the 60s to the 80s and I have a lot of free time next week with my work being closed.

Hooray for 11 days off from work. Hooray for random fun art projects that connect us back to our family roots. And hooray for the internet and its post-geographical community building.