My Favorite Prints

The following images are some of my favorite photos that I took and developed.

1) My cat

I added a bit of contrast to the final print, to create a cooler effect. 

This picture is of my cat, taken at my house. I absolutely love this picture, because A., she's my cat, B., she's cute, and C., I think it is a very nice picture, as her whiskers, nose and eye are all very sharp. I took another one of her, which was a bit better because she was facing the camera more. However, this one was much more focused than the other one, so I decided to develop this image instead. Three of the edges of this image are black, because I was shooting with a black wall behind her. I realized this as soon as I developed it, so I should focus on where I'm shooting next time around. Other than that, I think this is a good photo. In fact, the original copy of this is framed inside my room. Shows how good of a pet owner I am, huh?












2) Hibiscus Flower

I think this hibiscus flower is my favorite print. It is a beautiful flower, and the detail is captured perfectly. It is a sharp image, which is absolutely essential when taking micro photos. I'm not giving myself a pat on the back (well I am, sort of...); if any other photographer took a photo of this quality I would also fall in love in an instant.

Developing your Film and Contact Sheet

The change from digital cameras to film cameras was a big change for me, as I have never used a film camera before. There were some significant changes, for example, I couldn't view / delete my images if they weren't good, I needed to manually adjust the lighting, and much more. It was a good change, though, because I got to live through new experiences in photography.

Step 1 : Take pictures using a film camera. You need to load the film in properly, otherwise the film would be exposed and your pictures would all be ruined. 

 Step 2 : Develop your film!

Film processing is a difficult procedure, because you need to make sure you don't mess up. Luckily for us, the advanced students in the class developed our film. Otherwise, if the 'newbies' tried to process it, everything would be ruined. To develop the film, you need to put several liquids through a light-proof can. The chemicals react with the film, creating your image. 

Step 3: After your film turns out nice, you will need to put it in something to protect it from getting moist, or dirty. What our class did was we cut the film strips and put it into a sleeve, as shown.















Step 4 : Once this is done, create your contact print! This is where the fun begins, but you need some prerequisites before you begin. You need a dark room, and several photo developing chemicals, such as developer, stop bath, and fixer. You also need photography enlargers that project light onto a canvas. This is what creates your image. 

This image contains a girl standing at one of the photo enlargers. She has to lay her film (in the sleeve) on a piece of photo paper, put it on the canvas, and project light for around 10 seconds, depending on the lighting in her original photos. 

This image was taken in a dark room. It is all red because of the red lights inside. The red lights are especially designed for dark rooms, because they don't expose photo paper. 

After the photo paper has been exposed, you need to slip it into the first chemical, the developer. This is the chemical that does the real magic; it creates your image! You need to leave the image in the developer for around 2-3 minutes, then move it on to the next chemical. The photo has to stay in the next chemical, stop bath, from 30 seconds to a minute, then it's one to the next one. Your photo needs to stay in the fixer for 5 minutes this time. The final step is the most important, you need to put it in the final rinse. This rinse cleanses your image free of chemicals, so that it is safe to touch and to display. The picture has to sit in a tub of water for at least 5 minutes undisturbed, then slipped into the dryer to be dried. This is quite a fun process for me, because I love being in the dark room watching my photo develop. 

The final product turns out fabulous! 

Pinhole Photos

Our second assignment was to take a picture with a pinhole camera. A pinhole camera is a small camera made out of a tin can. It is round, has a tiny hole in it (hence the name pinhole), which light shines through. On the inside, there is a piece of photo paper that is exposed to create the picture. Below is a picture of the pinhole camera that my partner and I used to shoot with. The hole has to be very very small, which is poked inside the silver strip in the middle. 

This is the inside of a pinhole camera. The camera has to be completely light proof, which is why the inside is spray painted black. The paper inside is what is being exposed to light, which creates the final image in the end. It is quite a difficult concept at first, but it is amazing. The way pinhole camera work are you have to expose them to light for a long period of time (10-20 minutes average) for the photo to turn up on the paper. 

My friend Jocelyn and I both went outside and set our cameras up on a pile of books (to match our height), and sat as still as we could for 12 minutes. Above is the negative image that was produced. This image seems to create a panoramic effect, and this is caused because of the round can that was used to photograph. This image turned out really sharp, but my legs are a bit ghostly, because I kept moving them. We were quite lucky, because our first attempt at taking a pinhole photo was nearly perfect, and the product satisfied us both. 

After we developed our negative, we used it to create our final print. The finishing product had inversed the black and white colors, but kept the overall astonishing effect of the image. Everything turns out sharp again (Except for my legs which I mistakenly moved). To think that a picture like that is created from a tin can! Photography really is amazing. 

As usual, you need to use test strips to test the contrast and exposure for the final image. I used the test strip below to test everything. As you can see, the image exposure is way too high, so I needed to decrease the time. The ending product is glorious. Even the lightest or darkest photos can be altered (under light) to create the perfect final print.

My First Prints

This is the first contact sheet I created in photography in semester 2. I helped my sister print one during our photography class in summer school (2013), but this is the first time I actually developed one on my own. I focused mostly on shooting micro images, because I have more of an interest for micro than anything else. Because of this, I needed to manually focus the subjects, which led to some errors in sharpness. However, this was only a minor problem, as most of the photos I took are in focus.

If you look closely, you can see that there are small X's on certain images. My photography teacher, Mr. Ubl, marked certain photos that he liked and wanted me to print. Of the 5 pictures he marked, I only developed 3 of them.

This is the test strip of the first photo (aside from the contact sheet) I developed. It is a photo of a plumeria floating on the water of a small pond in my backyard. The purpose of the test strip is to see if the time, light exposure and color added makes the final image look good. My first test strip is on the right. As we can see, the time I exposed the photo paper for was a bit too long, which made the flower a bit dark. For my second strip, I decreased the time to make the flower lighter, and added a little bit of  magenta to increase the contrast. After I developed the second test strip, we decided that all aspects of the image were perfect, and I was through to developing the final image, which is shown below. 

I think this is one of my favorite pictures I developed. It is sharp, and focuses on the beautiful flower. However, next time, if I try to recreate this photo, or if I were able to go back in time and retake this, I would try to take it with better lighting, because the water is really dark. I took this photo at around 5:00 PM on a stormy day, so the lighting wasn't that great. Next time, I need to make sure that I keep the time of day in my mind, so that I know what time the lighting would be best. That way, I could take a much prettier photo next time around. 

If you click the image, you can see a close-up version of it. It may look blurry or out of focus to you, but it is actually the grainy effect on the picture. It is supposed to be this way, because it adds effects and a sense of 'photography from the old days,' in my opinion.