Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Picture Blog

I'm taking a lovely photography class that still uses the retro form of film! Of course this also means working in the dark room with chemicals and all sorts of other scientific knowledge that will help me take better pictures. (I'm just glad we have to know what the effect is and not the entire scientific reaction that occurs.)

We worked this week on manipulating the paper in the dark room. Not to bore you with the details, but the paper works like the film in the sense of light exposure = dark areas. So these are called "photograms", which are done by putting objects on the paper to block the light from darkening certain areas. Some items are more transparent, turning those spots grey instead. Here are the photograms that I did...



This was a "desk" concept. Several people used this same idea. This was an easy one, setting the timer and strategically placing the objects on the page to try and make it look cool. The real magic happened in the developer. If you've never seen a picture developed old school, I highly suggest finding your closest dark room and have a gander.








This was the one I was REALLY excited about. After the demo our professor did on Monday I went home and started planning. This one was a process. I made the tree and 3 hills with thick paper and an exact-o knife (including the cut out of the little creature there). I also used wax paper to make clouds, though I didn't like how they were turning out on the test runs, so I scrapped that. The snow is sugar in the raw that I got packets of from a local bookstore/cafe. This is the third attempt. The first was over exposed, the second underexposed. And as Goldilocks would say, this one was just right.