Gave up smoking , period, when all the images in my portfolio looked like crap under the influence. I never printed an image i shot when high. The only positive thing is that the gear doesn't weight that much....
Gave up smoking , period, when all the images in my portfolio looked like crap under the influence. I never printed an image i shot when high. The only positive thing is that the gear doesn't weight that much....
I went through a period where I wanted to try 'creating' when on recreational drugs. Didn't work out so well. One of my favorite portraits was taken on ecstacy, a beautifully lit shot of my best friend leaning on her couch - pure luck as I wasn't really thinking lighting and composition that night. Unfortunately the negative disappeared during a move and the only print I have is tiny.
A difficulty I discovered later shooting on hallucinogens - turns out that the blue butterflies flying out of my coat don't turn up on film!
What was the queestion again?
"I meant what I said, not what you heard"--Jflavell
Photographing with a lite buzz is fine.
Full stoned or drunk? Too afraid I'd drop a lens.
A couple of days later we hit the "play" button and listened to what we had recorded. It sounded something like a continuous-looped sample of the peloton of the Tour De France crashing in slow motion into the side of an aluminum warehouse.
Hahaha - this reminds me of a drawing I did while on shrooms once. It looked nothing like I thought it would the next day. Mind you, though, the fact that my hands were melting at the time didn't help the process of drawing well. Still, even if it isn't what you thought it would be, the experience was probably pretty awesome.
There have really only been a few times when I've hit some sort of really sweet groove while significantly under the influence and spent a whole night making good images, doing good writing, or what have you. Much more often I'll find that a few drinks or a brownie will help in that it'll just get me to relax enough to stop and really look at things. Photographing/drawing/painting/whatever while completely blitzed is more of a crapshoot and tends to just end up with me getting more distracted than anything else. Still, some cool stuff does happen when you get into the right frame of mind.
Here are some examples of shots I've done while under the influence:<br />
Midnight Dandelions<br />
Drinking<br />
James<br />
Railing<br />
Rope<br />
Steps<br />
I've never gone out with LF when not sober. To me, doing large format seems more of a sober working method. All of the above shots were done at night with my Nikon with Neopan 1600 and a 50mm f/1.2. Those working methods seem to fit intoxiphoto much better for me. There is, of course, always the danger of getting fascinated with the super-shallow focus and spending many minutes looking through the viewfinder fascinated without actually making any images, but I'll accept that risk.
Finally, does anyone else find it funny that people here shy away from actually typing the word "eBay" (often referred to as that auction site), but seem fine with talking about the use of illegal substances out in the open?
(The "eBay" thing comes from photo.net, where your post will be rejected in some of the forums if it contains the word "eBay." I think they also do this on the Graflex.org forum. At least once when I wanted to mention something that I saw "for sale," the words "for sale" were replaced by asterices, so I had to reword the sentence.)
Visit your library or at least read the following page: http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/classroom/witkacy/witkacy.html and see what Witkacy was able to create. Yes he was a photographer too and used LF gear as well.
I can add that a shot of vodka helps to sharpen your senses and clear your mind unfortunately also by lowering your ability to control your body movements - especially hands-eye coordination (you can film/video yourself and view it later, while sober) - so it can cause more problems instead of improving your creativity. Size of shooter of course matters- I think like in many aspects of photography also in this case less is actually more.
cheers!
"Full stoned or drunk? Too afraid I'd drop a lens." --Andre,
If you really want to live dangerously, go shopping in the large format section of Ebay while under the influence...
"I love my Verito lens, but I always have to sharpen everything in Photoshop..."
i got the big idea that i would take 8x10 portraits of my house guests at a party i threw. some came out great, but more than half fell victim to mistakes. pulling the dark slide before closing the lens was the most common for me. too many things to think about after a few glasses of strong mojito. maybe the smaller formats are better suited for libations
"I'm high on the real thing: Powerful gasoline, a clean windshield, and a shoe shine!"
- Firesign Theatre
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