Next Photo Assignment and Spring in my Garden!

Today was the 3rd class of the Basic Photography course I am following at FotoFactory. I wasn't sure I was going to make it to class, as I had minor surgery yesterday...but I made it and glad that I did.

It was a beautiful spring day in Amsterdam, so naturally we went into the darkroom.

The first step was to develop a Test Strip to check the exposure on the enlarger I was using. This was my result:
The next step was to make a Photogram, which is quite an art in itself, but is essentially placing an object on a piece of photo paper. The exposed portion will turn black and the area covered by the object will turn white. Being my first attempt, my photogram was relatively simple. I used Artis de Partis from my keychain (The mascot of the Amsterdam Zoo, Artis). I like the look of it and made a series of him in poses (you can see the complete series here). I won't bore you with all of them- but here is one:


Once we made the photogram, we got made contact sheets from the negatives we made in the previous class. From the contact sheets (my photo partner Elaine and I took 3 rolls of film from our shared camera) we need to select one photo to develop for our first print I couldn't decide, so I picked two. Both were taken at the Nieuwemarkt in the center of Amsterdam. the first one is a young boy and his puppy:


I used this photo to check focus more then anything. The light on my enlarger was nearing it's end of life and wasn't very bright so I was having trouble seeing the details when trying to focus the negative on my other chosen print. I didn't really fine tune this print, I mostly guessed at the exposure time (which I think I was about 10 seconds). The puppy is perfectly focussed, which I am happy about, alhtough his little paw coming up in the bottom of the frame looks like something else at first glance.

My second print was for the assignment to take a photo of police officers at the Nieuwemarkt. However, it was a rainy day and there weren't any about, so I chose some other men in uniform: Scottish football fans visiting for the Holland vs Scotland game:

I like the composition of this one. They were very polite and posed for me as I asked if I could take a photo of their legs for a photo class. This one took me a few tries to get the right exposure, but I finally was satisfied with a 12 second exposure at f5.6 on the enlarger.

So that was my adventure in developing, part two. I am really enjoying the development part of the class.

Yesterday afternoon I wandered into my garden and saw my Magnolia tree was blossoming. Beautiful. This is my favorite of the (undoubtably hundreds) of photos I took yesterday:


Next week, more photos to develop as well as fixing some of the (many) problem photos.