Vinegar girl

Last month, I was commissioned to take a photo of the “Vinegar Girl” sign in Richmond. The intention was to capture the beauty of the sign that it will ultimately hang on someone’s wall.

The sign itself has two different “looks” because at 8.30pm every night it lights up with animated neon. So I checked out both to see how it looks in each case and also how it interacted with the sky and the surrounding architecture. After I’d seen this, I felt that sunset would be the best time to capture it. I’d suspected this before I’d even embarked on this venture. Without question, the choice for me was to use a particular Ektachrome film: Kodak E100VS. The “VS” means “Vivid Saturation” but that’s not the reason I chose the film. A few years ago I discovered that this particular film responds to colour in a unique way during the twilight part of the day. The film appears to amplify a particular kind of warm purple that I find is quite beautiful. I’ve had this colour even appear in scenes where there was no visible purple at the time. Here’s a few examples I’ve taken in the past. In each case, no colour adjustments have been made from the original scans.

The resultant shot, the one that was the favourite with the client, did end up being the sunset shot. The final print was even made from a completely unaltered scan of the slide, which can be seen here.

vinegar girl
Melbourne
Nov 2010

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~ by memetic on December 18, 2010.