Petting a Small Dragon (graffiti in colour infrared)

Petting a Small Dragon
Petting a Small Dragon

See this photo at EyeEm.

Petting a Small Dragon by Mike Jackobo

Graffiti on the wall of a cabin, depicting a girl petting a small dragon. The cabin and the graffiti adorning it, are located on the park surrounding the archaeological site of Plato’s Academy. I took the photograph in the style of the old Kodak EIR colour infrared slide film.

A graffiti is always a strong subject in photography. Capturing a graffiti though poses the challenge of making an original work of art using it, instead of just recording something that is already there. In this case I used the plants adjacent to the cabin and the colour infrared look to include my own elements in the photo. The subject of the painting is petting a small dragon. The red colour on the leaves created the impression of a fiery landscape which I find appropriate for the photo.

The look of the Kodak EIR is one of the things I wanted to achieve for a long time. I have already tried the technique of trichrome to achieve it (another example of infrared trichrome) but I wanted to make it easier for me. I attached a yellow filter on my full spectrum camera to see what results I could get. Of course, as with the more standard colour infrared technique, the colours were nowhere near the final result. Through experimenting, I found a process that uses only channel mixer in photoshop, plus my usual processing workflow. I am still in the process of fine tuning the process, but I feel I am in a good point for moving forward. Expect more of that in the future!

* photographs always need some post-processing -even in a dark room. It is not bad by itself but overdoing it, makes it bad.

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