Further Developments in the Darkroom

Saturday was the 3rd day in the Darkroom, and of course, like previous days, it was GORGEOUS weather outside. Nonetheless, I brought my iPod and we all listened to music while developing our next photos.

We learned to Dodge and Burn when developing photos, a technique where by you can expose different parts of the photos to light at different times. In portraits, for example, by making the face a bit lighter (with less exposure) and the hair slightly darker, it focuses on the face more.

So, to start off with, I had to pick one photo from the 3 pages of contact sheet to develop. I wasn't sure, so I started off with two photos. The first one is a test strip from some Piopino mushrooms I took at the food market on the Nieuwemarkt:


The test strip is used to expose the image at different exposure times to try and find out which one is the correct exposure time. Once you pick the exposure time, you 'Fine Tune' the exposure,, then you come out with the final print. I wasn't completely happy with this photo, so I spent more time on my second choice, but here is the photo above at , I think around 12 seconds:



The second photo I chose to develop was a portrait of a classmate named Katerina. One of our assignments on the day we shot photos was to take portraits of 3 of our classmates. This was my favorite one of her. First the test strip:






The exposure time on the far right is 32 seconds, then 16 seconds, then 8, 4, 2, 1, 1. I (along with the assistance of my lovely teacher Desiree Vroeman, who has much more experience in these things...) determine the correct exposure to be between 8 and 16 seconds. After some more fine tuning, I think (if I can remember ) the exposure time was 8 seconds. The the Dodging and Burning begins. The result was this photo of Katerina:



I worked through lunch and developed another portrait of another classmate, Elaine. First the test strip (notice the clever use of a cover paper with holes in it...leaves an interesting effect!)



This after consultation with Desiree, and some fine tuning, this photo was exposed for 7 seconds. The negative was damaged (which you can see from the black spot to the right of her face), so I reframed the photo...did a little dodging and burning and came out (after a few tries!) with this photo:



Unfortunately Saturday was our last darkroom day. The next three classes will be 'Digital' focused. We are going into the studio and will learn about working with studio lighting. We also have an assignment to recreate a famous photo. It was recommended that we try to recreate a photo called The Fork by André Kertész. I need to get busy with that!