I just joined Facebook…

which of course means digging through old high school photos in order to post them. I found this 8×10 of my friend Ione from Hollywood High. I’m pretty sure this was taken around 1986 which would have made us about 15 or 16 years old. Anyway, my Stepmother had built a darkroom in one of the closets at home, and this is one of the first photos I shot and actually processed in a darkroom by myself. On that day, sensor and compact flash card was film, and photoshop was a bunch of smelly chemicals and a light bulb. To tell you the truth, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into photography if it had stayed that way. Now I know there’s a lot of purists out there who might disagree, but I love the freedom of shooting and editing digitally. Then again, it’s ironic how so many people take a crisp clean digital image, and then beat it up, adding textures and scratches, to sort of dull it back down to a film look. I completely love that too. There’s something to be said about a beat up old photograph… like this one.

~Ione~

Ione (North Hollywood, California 1986)