Charlotte Makes Photos

This past Saturday was Halloween! Now, for one reason or another, I’ve never been much into the holiday — perhaps save for my prime candy-desiring ages¹ –, but Kathleen is very much into it.

This year, she began working on her costume, which was inspired by one of the Lestat’s looks in The Vampire Lestat, which she is very much into, in the late Spring and wanted to be able to show it off a little.

Unfortunately, where events we may attend are concerned, the pickings tend to be a little slim and fall into two categories: children’s events and neighbourhood trick-or-treating and adult events mostly related to alcohol held at the time of night we’re likely to be comatose. Won’t somebody think of the earlybirds who don’t really drink?

Maybe next year. Maybe I’ll learn to fall in line, dress as a slutty plum or something, and we’ll go out anyway. Maybe next year.

🎃

So instead, since I’ve been wanting a visit to the National Gallery lately, we decided that’s what we would do on Saturday. She in costume, me a party-pooper, I’d have an opportunity to make photos and she would be able to be out and about in her costume, and we’d both enjoy the art.

I must say, whether it was at the Gallery or around the Market afterward, she did not get much notice. I know that some of that came down to me not being in costume but, well, I’m visibly trans, so politeness might have overridden some people’s desire to comment, but she deserved far more recognition for her work.

So then, what was new to me?

I knew that a 100 ISO slide film was not going to be entirely compatible with the lower light environment of the gallery, but I wanted to try all the same. Especially since I’d have the privilege of being in the same room as Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire. So that meant longer exposures than I can possibly manage handheld and that I’d be relying on surfaces and the cable release I’d stash in my purse.

Compositionally, it’s not my favourite roll, but what I am rather happy with is that I had my longest exposure ever on this roll. It’s the photo above with Kathleen watching one of the video installations, a 30-second exposure. I love the way it turned out.

I know that I will be trying this again, with slide again too. Other than working a little harder on finding pleasing compositions, I will also find myself a cooling filter to compensate for the warmer lighting of the gallery. For these scans, I changed the colour temperature digitally, which feels a little like cheating.

1. And even then, I couldn’t match the energies my sister or dad had for it all. ↩︎