This post marks the start of Saving Daylight, my personal portfolio and blog website.
The name refers to the act of taking a photograph. It was inspired by the process of black and white film photography.
During an exposure, photons hit silver halide crystals present in the film’s emulsion. The resulting reaction absorbs the photon and turns the exposed crystals into a (latent) image. The final negative image is formed and fixed during subsequent development.
I’d like to think that each negative quite literally contains a small bit of ‘stored’ daylight, which was captured from the very scene where and when the image was taken.
When printed on light-sensitive paper, this negative is able to reproduce the positive image. To my mind, this is as close as you can get to retrieving a moment from the past. In a way, we are – quite literally – saving daylight.
The link between the event itself and the digital image is less strong in digital photography. That’s why I intend this website to focus on film photography. Let’s see how that goes… Digital photography is much more accessible and the majority of my work to date is digital.
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