March 30th, 2024 - Ohio - Fuji X100VI
The Blog
The original Instagram
A mix of “recent” photos, B-sides, remixes, alternate takes, archived client work, and dispatches from a younger me. Less curated, more curious.
September 3rd, 2015 - California - Canon 5D Mark II
April 3rd, 2024 - Ohio - Fuji X100VI
September 3rd, 2025 - Ohio - Fuji X100VI
The jury is still out on whether I like the results I get from false color infrared.
September 5th, 2015 - California - Canon 5D Mark II
April 18th, 2021 - California - Sony A7RIV
October 10th, 2025 - West Virginia - Fuji X100VI
December 23rd, 2023 - West Virginia - Fuji X100
While this Photo Remix doesn’t follow the original rule of starting with a bad edit, the fourth entry in any series is usually when rules go out the window, so here we go!
This time I’m working with a photo from the archive that even I hadn’t seen before. I was shooting with friends in Asheville, NC, when this moment with this man singing loudly from his truck and blaring music as he drove by happened so fast, I didn’t have time to adjust my exposure from the previous scene. It was point, pray, press the shutter. I never gave the image a second look past the initial import thumbnail, assuming it was unrecoverable.
It wasn’t until recently, while browsing Immich (my self-hosted photo archive/backup tool), that I stumbled across it again. Immich applies its own DNG interpretation to RAW files, so what I saw was a lifted version of the exposure. The result was rough and noisy… but maybe there was something there. I’ll start with the straight-out-of-camera image that made me abandon the shot, then show the Immich preview I rediscovered in 2025, and finally the edits
Straight Out of Camera:
November 19th, 2011
Asheville, North Carolina
Canon EOS 5D Mark II
EF 50mm f1.4 USM
ƒ/1.4
1/5000 s
50 mm
ISO 100
Yikes!
Good luck perceiving an image there. At ISO 100 and 1/5000s, I was basically stress-testing my camera’s sensor.
Immich Preview:
The composition lined up with what I was aiming for 14 years ago, and focus wasn’t a total miss.
The driver’s face isn’t tack-sharp, but his open mouth/expression adds something.
The amount of noise in this preview is wild so expectations in Lightroom were low.
2025 Black and White Edit
Obviously, we’re starting with Black and White. 🩼
I corrected the horizon and cropped to remove the wasted space on the left of the frame, then lifted exposure by more than 3.5 stops - just enough to reach a still-dark but acceptably moody place. I’m fine with the crushed shadows in the defocused tree and the woman’s hair since they frame and almost trick your eye into looking past them and at the subject: the man in the truck. The highlight lines on the truck’s body and cab also help pull your eye straight to him. The tree cutting off the truck’s front breaks your brain’s object-recognition enough to create intrigue, while the woman’s out-of-focus tilted head adds an almost-triangular tension to the composition.
Modern editing software really flexes here; I don’t remember being able to pull this much shadow detail from 5D Mark II files back in 2011. Upping the exposure brought artifacting, but less than expected. The woman’s face outline almost glitches into rough pixelated lines, but I don’t hate it. 🙊 I did clone out a diamond-shaped patch of noise on her cheek that was too distracting, but left the pavement and truck paint artifacts in (skill issue? laziness?). Lightroom’s AI Denoise did some heavy lifting (duh): I masked the truck, lifted shadows sparingly, and enhanced highlights to give more shape. On the driver, I added clarity and contrast to pull more focus to his face.
The image is still a little rough around the edges, but I like how it turned out. Sure, digital noise lacks film’s softness, but nostalgia is cyclical - people are already romanticizing old digicams. Grain or glitch, maybe it all comes around?
2025 Color Edit
I love the colors, but this one only holds up at Instagram size. At larger scale, the artifacts on the truck and pavement drag it down.
August 27th, 2025 - Ohio - Sony A7RIV
There’s a cat in this photo, you just can’t see it.