Stanley can be a real pain in the ass to photograph. Here in LA, we’re blessed with an abundance of strong natural light. As a professional Inky Void, Stanley absorbs all of it from almost any angle. Most pictures of him end up looking like a black smear with two angry yellow stars glaring at you. Photographing Stan is like trying to shoot of a pile of charcoal briquettes on a black tarp in a sealed antechamber of a cave. With no flash.
This means we often have to resort to some light touch up work before we can post the picture. In this case, the auto-fix setting on my phone didn’t work. Not only was he largely backlit with a fully open, sunny window behind him, I also had a big greasy fingerprint on the lens. I’m a gross slag, I know. I can’t help it, I just drip oil. Anyway, I needed big guns, so I turned to good old Photoshop.
The end result actually ended up kind of interesting I thought, because it has that old Kodachrome feeling to it to me. Not the way old Kodachrome looks now (30 years after printing), with its false orange and washed out colors, but how it looked when it was freshly printed. It’s a look I’ve always loved.
Speaking of love, Stanley also loves sitting on the bunny-kick toys, especially when Oscar has been trying to play with it. (We call them bunny-kick toys because of the way the cats flop over and frantically rend the toy with their back feet. Bunny-kicking.)
Beauty is timeless, and Stan is definitely beautiful, in any light. Or no light.