Window Mat for Photography

Finished my second print and my first window mat for photography. It was somewhat stressful, cutting the mat only a few hours before class started, but I got the job done pretty nicely.

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.

My First Print

Here it is, after many test strips to get the exposure right and the picture in focus, I'm successfully printed my first photograph.

It's of my beautiful wife, if you're curious. I find myself lucky that I have such a beautiful model right in front of me to photograph. Not sure if this is the print I'm going to choose for the intro assignment due on monday, because it would require much burning to get more detail in her face and hands.

Either way, she's beautiful, but the composition is off. I cut off her hand in the bottom right and the top of her head. Just the issue of having to deal with a manual SLR. Shooting people is hard because they have to stay still and you have to choose the right settings. It may not look like it, but Missy was sitting like that for probably a good 45 seconds. She's so patient. :D

My First Contact Sheets

In the darkroom today, using the same technique to make photograms, I used my negatives to create contact sheets. These enable me to make a conscious decision about which negative to make into a print.

Photograms

Who knew that you could actually make a photograph without using a camera. Photograms are just that. You place objects on light sensitive paper, then expose them to light (longer under the light, blacker the blacks). The objects cast shadows on the paper and leave their white counterparts. After about 5 hours of working in the dark room, I ended up making 6 of them.

Here's a list of the objects I used:

1. sun glasses
2. ipod cords
3. headphones adapter
4. headphones
5. my iPhone
6. rubber ducks
7. flash drives
8. scissors
9. a woman's blouse
10. plastic gun
11. felt heart
12. bag of m&ms
13. root beer bottle

And here are the finished pieces:

First Rolls of 35mm Processed Film

So I finally got into the darkroom today and processed three, COUNT 'EM, three rolls of film! It was hectic, time consuming, and also somewhat rewarding.

Getting the film on the rolls was the worst. Complete darkness, trying to shove this extremely thin film that wants to roll up into it's perfect little roll every chance it gets into a plastic opening about 2mm thick will give you enough stress to throw your film into the black air and collapse onto the cold ground. I didn't do the former but will admit to having to relax and sit down for a little bit while my photo partner fixed my roll.

After that it was pretty simple, 10 minutes of developer and rocking the developing tank back and forth to agitate it, then washing the film, and finally fixing it so that it wasn't light sensitive anymore. When I pulled the film off the drying racks I was instantly reminded why photography is probably my favorite medium to work with.

Here are some negatives from my first rolls. I found an iPad app to use that turns the screen into a lightbox to view them which I'm using in these pictures.

Pretty awesome stuff if I do say so myself.

Oh, the Fun of 35mm Photography

I'm taking ART 251 this semester, and it's proving to be a very expensive class. I lucked out on finding a manual camera from my grandma that I can use, but spent over a $130 on other equipment we'll be using to develop and enlarge our black and white photographs. Today we learned how to develop and process our film, which I'm excited to do for the first time--though it seems extremely monotonous and daunting.

I spent the last couple of days shooting and ended up filling two rolls of film, mostly on pictures of my dog and the surrounding areas of our apartment complex, including the pretty cool abandoned prison next door.

Here's some pictures of the camera my grandma lent me for the class. It's a Canon, which I'm not that crazy about, but It'll do.

I'll be processing my rolls sometime this week, and will probably put up some pictures of the process later. For now, it's time to work on my wire sculpture.