The other day my friend Michael Tardioli dropped by to help me with some
printing problems. (Not technical problems, aesthetic ones.)

While he was here he mentioned that he thinks I post too many new pictures
on drool, that I should hold some back for later, on my website, or something.

Well, that’s just not the way I roll. I’m like a kid, I get excited. Besides, I take
a lot of fotos and what else am I gonna do with them except think about them
and show them to folks? Which is kind of what blogs are (or should be) about.

I’ve always thought that drool was a place to throw up experiments, random
thoughts and worries, confusions, opinions, also-rans, failures and successes.

So this week I’m going to talk a little bit about the USER process. Not the
shooting process, but what happens after I get home; how these images
come to be up on drool.

HOW IT WORKS (part 1)

I don’t make contact sheets or gang-scan the negs. I throw them onto my
little lightbox and look at them. I’ve been looking at negs for 30 years.

Negs on the lightbox

If I see a frame I like (I’m aided in my selection by having been at the shoot and
remembering what pictures I took, if you know what I mean) I throw it into the
scanner and do a quick preview scan. If it looks good and meets certain criteria
I do a high resolution scan and some preliminary Photoshop corrections on it.
Then I put my head down over the lightbox and look for the next good frame.

Tracey, Ottawa, 2010

During this initial edit all I’m trying to do is to identify and do a bit of post
production on any image that might be useful to the project. There are a
ton of reasons I’ll pick one frame and reject another….but I’ll save that for
another post

Alexandra, Ottawa, 2010

So the USER images you’re seeing roll out onto drool every week are only
potential final shots with only preliminary post production. These, and
a whole bunch more, all get thrown into Aperture, where I make a light
table with them and, in my spare time, when the inclination hits, I move
them around, put them in different orders and think about what I’ve done
and what still needs doing.

Then I go and do it.

HOW IT WORKS (part 2)

Regular droolers might be wondering what has happened to the good-old
magazine format that this blog has adhered to for the past bunch of years.
Bits about me, bits about the Ottawa-foto-scene, bits about what I’ve been
looking at in the wide world of fotografy (even though my foto-world isn’t
actually that wide) and the occasional rant.

These days drool is just USER, USER, USER….

But, then again, regular droolers also know I have my obsessions, and when
I’m shooting USER, or any personal project, that’s it. Obsession.

That’s how I get these personal projects done…..by pushing aside the regular
routines of my existence and focusing in. Some might even say: by being
selfish. Yeah, I’m that.

That’s how it works.

Rikki was in a bad way Friday, drug sick. I gave her some money to get drugs.

A little while later she came back, crying. She’d been ripped off and was still sick.