Welcome to my cave, where you can learn a bit about who I am, what a spinout really is, and what the images in my gallery are!

It all started with one mistake. In 2008 my father, Mike Collette, was teaching me how to create a rollout image with a Better Light scanning back. Not fully thinking it through and having only a faint concept of how a rollout works, I inserted the scanning back in the top of the 4x5 camera, rather than the side where it was supposed to go. So instead of a nice rollout of some sort of can that we were shooting (for demonstration purposes), I produced a strange, spiralling mass of something indistinguishable. It was bland, dull, out of focus, and had a less-than-pleasing form. All it really looked like was a mistake, but something about it...intrigued me.

I fixed the scanning back's position and shot a few rollouts with varying amounts of success: my knowledge of photography in general was minimal at that point. But I couldn't stop thinking about that strange spiralling mistake I made earlier. The curiosity eventually overhwelmed me, so I borrowed some colored pens and put them in front of the camera, put the scanning back in the wrong way, then let loose a prescan. It turned out spectacularly, a swirling mass of unidentifiable color, majestically swooping up and down the image. The different pens twisted around each other while the overarching form kept them all together. The image felt so real yet fake, so wrong yet right, so...beautiful.

I fell in love.

Want to know more about lil' ol' me? Click here!

Want to know more about the process of making spinouts? Click here!

Want to know more about the galleries and what the subjects actually are? Click here!