Film (Darkroom)
This year in photography, I was given the task of shooting some of my own photos with a film camera, then going through the process of developing those photos. Once I shot, there was the long process of moving my film from the camera to the tank for development, and then I had to develop that strip altogether to get my negative sheet, which is the first picture shown below. From there, I had to go through the process of making a contact sheet, and then seeing which photo of mine turned out the best and pick the one which I would want to develop into a full page photograph. The process I went through to get my photo, from the negative sheet to contact sheet to the test strip to the final product, is shown below.
Negatives: This sheet shows how my photos looked after I first dveloped the whole roll and dried it overnight in the drying cabinet. All of my photos are shown here, but the colors are inverted. This was the first step.
Test Strip: I used a portion of the developing paper to determine what light exposure would be the best for my final photo. I moved a piece of cardboard across the screen over the course of a 15 second light exposure, showing a differentiation of colors from light to dark. I ended up going with an exposure of 6 seconds, the second lightest shade.
Contact Sheet: I developed my negatives in the darkroom to make into this contact sheet. It portrays all of the same photos as the negative slip did, but now the colors are regular and it is much easier to differentiate between them. It was from here that I selected which photo I wanted to develop furthest into my final.
Final: This is my final photo, which I developed with an exposure of 6 seconds on a full sheet of developing paper.
This project was extremely fascinating. Being able to go through the whole process of shooting the film to putting it in the tank to going through all of the stages of development of the photos was a really interesting experience. It was a project and a process that I would most definitly be interested in trying out again sometime.