Accidental Blues
Self Portrait with dog, digital photograph/camera obscura, 2026
Today I made some prints on high quality inkjet photo paper to see what my latest experimental photographs would look like in the physical realm. My printer was playing up yesterday when I was trying to print black and white, it kept printing blue until I tricked it into thinking I was printing on plain paper and then it didn’t use composite black made of all the colours, just the black ink. The problem with the composite black is that the yellow ink seems to be blocked, which is why these colour prints I made today are accidentally blue.
This accident appealed to me, after I saw the first print come out, I decided to keep printing other images in this series and now have a few. Seeing these blue ones I’ll likely edit some or maybe even use filters next time I take photos to achieve rich blues. Using gloss gives it a lot of depth, but doesn’t photograph well in my studio. These prints are meant to be looked at in real life though, not through the screen.
Ronette’s Dream (Season Two, Episode One) - Twin Peaks
I shared some of the camera obscurer experiments on reddit and one user noted that they had “Laura Palmer Energy”, to which I replied “I just had a damn fine cup of coffee”, referencing of course the amazing series ‘Twin Peaks’ created by the late great David Lynch and novelist/screen writer Mark Frost. The series has some wonderfully surreal scenes, maybe subconsciously I was composing my photos the way I did because every time I drive to London to see my girlfriend, we watch the show.
Anyway David Lynch was an amazing artist, a transcendentalist too which I’m very interested in at the moment, Walden is on my Wishlist and I heard the beginning of an adaptation of Walden on Radio 4 the other day which you can listen to here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002qrfw
It’s all about this idea of living more intentionally which of course I’m trying to do with digital minimalism but also minimalism in my everyday life, getting rid of things I don’t use and trying to be thoughtful of the things I buy, things I consume like social media, of which I have quit, bar reddit and YouTube if they count. Consumption is something I want to do less than creation, for creation produces more curiosity and inspiration than spying on others online idealised version of themselves, in fact all of that causes resentment. Not cool. Resentment leads to me feeling guilty, depressed, apathetic, it’'ll bring about self-destruction too. Booooo! I wanna be in the process of using materials to craft my art, weather they are real tactile materials or light waves, way better than the stare the very smart phones get.
Right then, better call it for this post, see u next time :-)