Picturequote

"Become who you are." - Nietzsche

I took some photos of my friend Derek a while ago for a project he's been working on for a little over half a decade now. He basically grows out his facial hair and then trims it into some style and documents it with photos. For his final photo he just grew out a gnarly beard.

Anyways, the first photo is a digital photo edited in Photoshop while the second is  4"x5" color slide film. I may have said this before on here, but I have a theory on film/digital photography. Digital photography tries to duplicate reality and does it very well - film does not. Film is a chemical process that was refined for roughly the last 100 years. The object was not to look real; it was to please the photographer, and to that end each manufacturer makes several types of color film that produce slightly different hues. My personal favorite is Fuji RDPIII (Provia). What's interesting to me is that digital photographers spend a lot of time in Photoshop making their digital photos look like film (think of all the iPhone apps that do this) not because they want it to necessarily to look like film, that may be what they're going for, but in reality they're just trying to make Reality (with a capital "r")  look more pleasing; which is what film does. Film is a tangible interpretation of what humans find aesthetically pleasing.