Photography as a Psychedelic Medium

I came of age in the late 60s and early 70s. As one that enjoyed making Solarized black and white prints more than traditional monochromes, I explored doing the same thing with color printing. Damn, the chemistry made that difficult. Where you had the ability to see the monochrome print as it developed, color had to be done in complete darkness. It had the additional problems of a very short development time and very strict temperature control. I modified a drum to allow a flash to hit the paper at the correct time, but was never happy with the results. No matter how tightly I thought I was controlling the variables (time, temperature, flash intensity, and color temperature), I could never get 2 images that were the same and rarely got an image I liked. I nearly gave up on my dream of using a camera to create the vibrant and colorful psychedelic art I enjoyed.

Then Adobe Photoshop version 4 came into my life. I had a scanner that could scan in images from my old negatives and decided to find out if there was a way to manipulate the image that would duplicate the solarization process, and there was, curves was the command of my dreams! I now had a tool that could make repeatable images that had all the qualities of the psychedelic artworks I had enjoyed seeing. I could now create psychedelic photographic images. See them at my website ( http://HabeneroPhoto.com ) or by them from my Red Bubble Site ( http://redbubble.com/Habenero