Mister Forty-sixer Poster

17" x 11", photography & digital, 2016

Back in 1999, I did some illustration and design for Markham Youth Theatre's production of City of Angels, and among the materials I created was a t-shirt featuring a hard-boiled detective, a staple of the film noir genre.

For the reference, I knew I had to call upon my friend Chris because of his particularly strong profile, so I put him in a jacket and hat, gave him my .45 caliber water pistol, then shot him with a strong backlight using my trusty 35mm Minolta SLR using black and white film stock.

I used the source photo pretty much as is. The nice vignetting/spotlight was caused by my studio lamps when I shot Chris, but the weird snowy noise was probably caused by age (it suited the poster, co I didn't clean it up in Photoshop).
This wasn't a regular 4" x 6" print, but a trimmed part from a contact sheet, so it was tiny. Still, I didn't scan the photo but instead I photographed it using some new macro filters I'd recently acquired for my Nikon DSLR. The screw-on filters are not so great (note the blurring around the outer edges) but they were inexpensive.

Around that same time I used Chris as my model for my painting Smokes and Baskets.

A few weeks ago, when I came upon the source image for the detective while rummaging through my photos, I thought it'd be fun to make some kind of teaser movie poster with it, knowing his 46th birthday was imminent (today!).

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CHRIS!

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