TV Portraits
The TV Portraits series is one of the non-serious departures I occasionally take from my normal photographic endeavors.
Every once in a while, when I’m watching a movie, I’ll pause it to do something: check on food that is cooking, answer the door, etc.
When paused, the image on the TV screen sometimes presents an interesting composition that I’ve started taking a quick shot of before resuming the movie.
I’m using a small 13 inch diagonal CRT (cathode ray tube) TV, which is about 60 years old that would be considered a dinosaur by anyone’s imagination. It belonged to my grandmother and has a lot of sentimental value for me opposed to the importance of video quality. Not a high definition model by any stretch. Due to that, the lines that make up the image on the screen are shown. And the screen’s picture is often not as sharp as a new screen would be.
But as I started looking at the growing number of images in the series, I realized that the scanning lines, and the TV’s optical deficiencies in terms of sharpness, actually appealed to me. They made it quite obvious that these were not screen grabs intended to be technically perfect but something akin to a quit, shot-from-the-hip, kind of photo.
Every once in a while, when I’m watching a movie, I’ll pause it to do something: check on food that is cooking, answer the door, etc.
When paused, the image on the TV screen sometimes presents an interesting composition that I’ve started taking a quick shot of before resuming the movie.
I’m using a small 13 inch diagonal CRT (cathode ray tube) TV, which is about 60 years old that would be considered a dinosaur by anyone’s imagination. It belonged to my grandmother and has a lot of sentimental value for me opposed to the importance of video quality. Not a high definition model by any stretch. Due to that, the lines that make up the image on the screen are shown. And the screen’s picture is often not as sharp as a new screen would be.
But as I started looking at the growing number of images in the series, I realized that the scanning lines, and the TV’s optical deficiencies in terms of sharpness, actually appealed to me. They made it quite obvious that these were not screen grabs intended to be technically perfect but something akin to a quit, shot-from-the-hip, kind of photo.
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