from the attic

Been going through a whole load of interesting boxes from my parents attic recently and have come across some very nice vintage items like this Sekonic cinecam, but I’ve also found some great graphics and imagery too. Above is a selection of some scans I took of reel-to-reel tape boxes that belonged to my Grandad, you can see the full set here. It amazes me the effort that would have had to go into the printing of these kind of materials back then. Loving the Philips dots in particular, reminiscent of some of the record sleeves I’ve seen on Project Thirty Three.

Below is a nice design that I scanned from an electric blanket box, pretty funkadelic for a Boots own brand product I thought.

The cinecam I found also came with a mini manual that the below images came from. Amazing Ilford logomark.

Portfolio refresh

After a fairly hectic past couple of months finishing up college, I’ve managed to get my new portfolio site up and running. Having used Indexhibit for the build and maintenance of my last site, it’s been both challenging and liberating designing this one from scratch. There’s a lot of the stuff from my last site up there along with a few new projects so feel free to have a look and let me know what you think in the comments…

www.davideunson.co.uk

bye-bye MySpace, hello SoundCloud…

Finally made the decision to bump the ever-clunky, messy myspace malarkey and make the move to SoundCloud. A far more pleasant experience it’s turning out to be too. Have put a handful of tracks up so far, most of them new. Tracks below are ‘Eclipse’, an acoustic song that I did with Karina Smillie (ultra lovely vox) and ‘No More Colours’ (featuring my not quite as lovely vox). You can hear the other tracks here, all of which are free to download. Enjoy.

Eclipse

No More Colours

100 days

Interesting project from Jessica Svendsen based on the classic Josef Müller-Brockmann poster where she created a different variation every day for 100 days. It’s great to see the progression of her ideas and how it developed throughout the project within the constraints of the original design.

Kim Høltermand – ‘Deserted City’

I’ve been following Kim Høltermand’s work for a while now and he never ceases to amaze me with every new series of photographs he produces. Other worldly minimal shots are his thing and the ambience and vibe he captures with his pictures are incredible. The above selection are no exception from his recent Deserted City set on Behance, which carry an eerie feeling throughout, some almost like they could be cities submerged underwater.

Interestingly, when he isn’t taking beautiful photos he works as a fingerprints expert in The Crime Scene Unit of The Danish National Police.

Geotic – ‘Mend’

Geotic is a side project of Will Wiesenfeld, AKA (the ever lovely)  Baths, and is giving away his new album Mend for free here. 14 tracks that were recorded in a ridiculous 4 days last month. Super lush melodic guitar and synth very reminiscent of Bibio’s lo-fi production combined with heavy Brian Eno influences and not a little Boards of Canada stylings to boot. Very delicious indeed.

Geotic – ‘Unwind’

What Goes Around…

Did a couple of new colourways of the What Goes Around print from the Idioms series which you can get here.

slides photography

Back in the eighties when I was a boy my Dad used to get out the slide projector and screen every once in a while and the family would gather on the settee for a wee slideshow. All sounds very cosy indeed but I really did look forward to these occasions. Something about slides has always fascinated me and as a kid everything from the carousel loading mechanism on the projector to the beam of dusty light had me totally enthralled.

So recently I decided to dig out my Dad’s old slides for a nosy and to see if I could convert them to digital. I never realised what a goldmine it would turn out to be, I must have found at least 1,500 slides so far. Obviously for me it’s a nice little nostalgic trip but the ones I’ve been most interested in so far are the shots from before I was born during the sixties and seventies. Some of the colours from the film that he was using then are incredible.

Of course it turns out digital conversion of slides is no simple task. I was under the impression that scanning them would probably achieve reasonable results but in practice the quality seemed to be better with that of a macro photograph taken on a light box (this may be down to the quality of my not-so-high-budget scanner). It may not produce as accurate a representation of the original as a high-res scan but I felt you could be a bit more creative with this method and also get some nice vignetting. However, it is a rather more complicated operation. You’ve got loads of issues with things like reflection from the camera body on the slide surface, bulb filament coming through, external light sources and white balance. One of the main problems I had was trying to establish an efficient procedure to get through the large volume of slides. I’m not even halfway through the ones I’ve found yet, but I do have the production line down to a T now.

I’ve edited a selection of them in Photoshop, mainly playing around with colours, levels, curves and saturation. You can see the ones I’ve done so far here and will keep updating the set as I get through the rest of them.

Mike Lemanski

Had the pleasure of stumbling on Mike Lemanski’s site the other day. Beautiful colour palettes and vintage feel in his work.

Engineering Will

A friend of mine, Barbara, asked me to do a portrait of her man Will who’s an engineeryperson, the result of which is above. It was for his birthday which is today, Barbara’s the one chomping his cheek on the left.

More of my portraits can be viewed here