This quarter I’ve been working with medium format color film. Before winter started, I’d only ever worked with 35mm black and white film. Film in general hasn’t been my forte so moving up to color and larger format film was pretty terrifying but it was so worth it. The difference in definition in the images is outstanding and I’ve started to really appreciate film. I’m still very much a digital photographer but this program has changed a lot of my feelings with film.

The first project my professor gave us this quarter was to actually destroy our notion of color. He wanted us to rip it apart so that we could really understand it for the rest of our color projects. Some people chose to do this through the absence of color and doing painted gray scale images but still photographing them in color where as others chose to monochrome their pictures by using different shades of one color for their subjects. I went a different route and decided to change specific colors that are set in our brains into other colors. What better to change than fruit? Each fruit has it’s own specific color and it never really changed. I mean there might be some change in the shade of it but it’s pretty much always the same. I didn’t want to be obvious though and just paint the outside of the fruit. I thought it’d be more interesting to keep the outsides normal and just mess with the insides.

The first fruit I decided to mess with was the oranges, I mean the color is literally in the name, it makes sense that I would change that one first. Anyway, I decided that an easy way to change the inside of an orange since it’s so watery, would be to use a small needle and inject food coloring directly into an orange slice. Naturally, this wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be and didn’t end up working out. My next attempt was with spray paint which worked so much better. I made the insides of the oranges blue while still leaving the outer peel intact. I decided to do something pretty similar with the next fruit apples. I took a bite out of one apple and tried to do the inject again but with purple ink and it sort of worked but not nearly enough. I ended up just using acrylic paint to paint the bite purple which looked a lot better.

The last fruit was probably my favorite out of all three, I made a baniwi! Basically a banana kiwi hybrid, it looked pretty cool if I do say so myself. I cut out parts of the banana and measured out a kiwi next to it so that it would fit and once I’d gotten it sized up correctly, I just shoved the kiwi into the banana. I think this was a favorite during my critique because a lot of people thought I actually grew it? I don’t know how that would be possible but hey it was cool so whatever.