Analogue FTW! (At least it is so far...)
 |
| My first B&W medium format contact sheet ^^ |
During the first month of this course I have learnt a great deal about using analogue film to take photographs instead of digital, and I can honestly say so far I absolutely love it! (I might not even go back to digital for a few years...)
The whole process of creating a negative, then processing this in the darkroom, and projecting the results onto photographic paper to create a latent image ready for printing is a real joy to do.
My favourite part of this process is the printing stage for black and white negatives, using various filter grades and exposure times to enhance the print really allows you to make the image your own and get the final print exactly right.
The pictures above show (albeit not very clearly - I took them on my iPad you see) the process and evolution of a print in order to reach the final image, I started off by creating test strips, the first of which featured test exposures of grade 2 at intervals of 5 seconds in order for me to decide which was the roughly correct exposure. Moving on from this I printed a full test strip of that exposure to get a closer look at both the highlights and shadows of the image. I found that the print was a tad overexposed and there was slightly too much contrast.
To counter the blown highlights, moving more of the exposure towards a lower grade filter to give them more time to imprint onto the photographic paper, whilst leaving a smaller exposure time for the grade 2 exposure.
I also found that the print suffered slightly because the shadows were slightly too light also, so to solve this problem I added a short, 5 second exposure with the grade 5 filter in place, this would give the blacks a much darker look, without compromising the rest of the image too badly.
I played around with the grades and exposure times a few times in order to achieve what I thought was the best possible print, a print which was pretty much ruined by the quality of my scanner:
 |
| Final Print, ignore the watermark, Lightroom exports all my pictures with one. |
