Its been a while since I stuck up a photo, so heres one from a couple of weeks ago of Michaela that I took while shooting for my uni project. I didn’t shoot that much on digi as most of the shoot was shot on B/W film, but I like the colours and tone in this. Brick wall ahoy.

D200, f/5.6, 1/80 @ iso100, Flash cam right with shoot through umbrella.

Well. There we go. the first term at AiB finished. 11 weeks gone in a flash. I’ve had a really good time so far, learnt a lot, and have met a load of really great, creative people. The last three to four weeks have probably been the most enjoyable with all the work being done to complete our two major projects. Last week it was our digital project, and today was the hand in of our Technical Workshop project. The Tech workshop has been a long drawn out affair, with us having to produce a 5×4″ transparency of a studio still life shot on a large format camera, two 8×10″ colour prints shot on medium format film in the studio, two 8×10″ colour prints shot on location, using ambient light, and two 8×10″ B/W on location of our choice using flash. That and a backup sketchbook with all our planning and tests in.

I’ve been processing and developing B/W at home off and on for a few years, and find the whole process pretty enjoyable. At AiB its even quicker as we have a dry process printer (no trays and chemicals) Exposed paper goes in one end, a few minutes later a nice dry print comes out the other. The darkroom is bathed in a nice red light, you can see what you are doing, everything is jolly.

The colour process is similar but done in total darkness, so fumbling about for paper is common. But the real pain is getting the colours right. As B/W has no colour, you just stick the neg in the enlarger, expose and print. If its too dark or light, then you shorten or lengthen the exposure time accordingly. For colour the enlarger has a mixing head with cyan, magenta, and yellow filters, and a combination of these gets a neutral colour balance. As negative film has a nice brown tint to it to start with, that is the first thing that is needed to be removed by adding or removing yellow and magenta, to hopefully get a neutral print with no colour cast. Plus working out the time for the initial exposure. But then add lots of filtration and the exposure needs to be altered again, change film and it needs to be done again… In all I found colour processing a very time consuming process, not to mention the amount of waste that getting one good print takes. I am usually a patient person, but the more I printed out my prints with +2 yellow, the more I didn’t want to print any more out. Four prints. Five hours.

Heres what seems to be a brief summary, from chatting to my fellow photography buddies, to add to the the good old Film vs Digital debate. For colour printing, digital is best. The time and materials it takes to get a decent colour-corrected print (in my experience) is greatly eclipsed by the ease to produce a digital print. It took five minutes and two attempts to get my digital project printed, and the first one was because or a tiny little smudge on the otherwise perfect print, as opposed to the 30-odd tests over however many hours to get a decent film print. As for “is film dead?” I think 35mm has had its day, but a 120 still looks amazing. Especially in transparency, it just needs to be scanned in and digitized before printing. As for black and white? well I’m still undecided on that. That could be next terms mini-project.

Wow. What a week. I’ve been pretty busy of late with coursework, today was the deadline for our ‘Incongruous’ project. This project that was to combine an image shot with DSLRs and Hasselblads/Phase Backs that couldn’t otherwise have existed. Cue lots of people floating, or being made smaller. My initial idea came from a mash up of Phillipe Halsman, Salvador Dali, and the amazing underwater photographer Zena Holloway. But this soon worked out to be quite complicated and would have required a lot of time, effort, and money. Not exactly things that the first project of uni would normally expect. Working through more Ideas, mostly influenced by films – ’300′ and ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’, I came up with a bit of a compromise, but one that would see the deadline at least. Falling back on my “keeping it simple” ethos, my idea was to have my friend Toby in his Taekwondo garb, floating in a Zen/meditation style, over the beach. Not exactly cutting edge, particularly hard to do or something that will grace the pages of my portfolio, but a solid piece of work anyway. I still have plans to possibly do my original idea, maybe sometime next year if I can work out the logistics and cost.

Our guest speaker this week was the photographers agent Mark George who represents photographers such as Don McCullen, Vincent Laforet, and personal inspirational favorite, Jim Fiscus. His lecture/chat covered many aspects of the photographic world from his 25-odd years in the industry, from the ideal size and quantity to print out portfolios (~A3, about 15 pages) to how to get better at photography (practice, practice, practice then edit – kinda obvious) via industry stories and general ‘how to make it’ as a photographer. In all a really interesting talk, one that I could quite happily have sat through for another 90 mins just ‘soaking up’ information like a photographic sponge. This was one of the main reasons I chose to go back to Uni to do photography as opposed to ‘Going it Alone’, I doubt anyone would have come away from that lecture without an increased knowledge of the photographic industry. Really top stuff. Next week is our last week before Christmas. I have a load of film to get printed, and another sketchbook to do before Thursdays deadline. All good though… maybe.