Late Night Darkroom Scramble

So I finally got my print for the first photo assignment due tomorrow. It's of a lovely ventilation shaft connected to the green house on the BSU campus.

I wasn't planning on printing this picture at all until Missy suggested it. I took her to the darkroom tonight to watch how all the magic happens, and she spotted this picture out of my contact sheet. I thought it was cool when I took it, but didn't much care for its negative/contact sheet counterpart. Printed, however, this picture looks great.

The metal texture came out awesome and I was able to expose it long enough to get the clouds in the background to show up. It was a bit technical though, which I tried to avoid. The branches on the right and bottom of the picture were showing up very dark, which meant that the exposure time to get detail on them wasn't enough to bring out the rest of the picture.

So what I did was expose the picture for 10 seconds, then dodged the bottom and right side of the picture so that they wouldn't get overexposed and appear dark. The result was a great success!

The entire picture is nicely focused, framed, and I felt better getter everything in crisp detail. Much different than just choosing the "dodge" or "burn" brush in Aperture 3. I love this hands on experience I'm gaining in this class.