Tom Raymondson photography

Circles

Last year’s Phantom Businesses was my first attempt at a photographic typology. I found the process of finding, photographing, editing, and presenting the images so satisfying that I knew I had to do it again. I toyed with the idea of an alphabet – pictures of letters on signs, but that seemed trite. Maybe an alphabet of found shapes – branches, fence posts, machinery parts? That might be interesting but it would take a while to collect all 26. “L” or “O” or even “S” would be easy to find, but where is a branch in the shape of “G” or “R”? I needed something a little more accessible. I considered several shapes and eventually settled on . . . circles! – they’re everywhere. I started photographing on Kodak Portra 400 in a Minolta XG-M with either the 45mm MD-Rokkor-X f2 or the 135mm MC Tele Rokkor f2.8. The challenges, without the immediate feedback of digital, were: 1. to photograph exactly straight on so the circles didn’t look like ovals; 2. to tightly frame in the viewfinder with enough allowance for minimal cropping of the scans in Lightroom; and 3. to make those final crops produce circles that were all the same size, considering that some of them had indistinct edges and also accounting for my limited post-processing skills. This is a work in progress – I’m still shooting around Ukiah and I know that I have some very promising (but yet unseen) circles on the current roll of film from Geyserville, Cloverdale, and Hopland. I may include signs with words like “circle” or “halo” – but we’ll see. [5/27/19 note: 45 of these have been printed as a typology, and yes on the circle words.]