Lights, Camera and...I need a Subject.

For my Photo III class, we were required to focus some of our energies in the lighting studio. It's a pretty fun setup down there. Intimidating as all get-out, but still, fun. 2400 watts (excuse me, i'm not very techno-savvy, so if it irks you that that's the wrong term... too bad) can be flashed at a time. you can run four strobes off of the power pack at a time, each light can output 600. Why you would EVER need to use that much energy for a single shutter release is beyond me, but then again i'm still pretty big on natural lighting.
The pictures to the left are images i took last spring. The only time i ever went in there last semester, and i was just goofing around with Leah and Keith. It was really fun at the time, but i wasn't much interested it in the long run, because at that time i was working on my journey project, which was more about experience with the world around you. Not so much about fabrication.
Anyway... I don't mean to complain. The lighting studio is actually really fun to test out ideas in. I'm not really all that interested in traditional studio setups. Still-life is kind of static and portraiture is boring for the most part. Whenever i get in the studio i end up using the hard light adapters because they give dramatic shadows and mood.
So this time, in the studio, i was kind of on me onesies. I was setting up light, metering, posing, shooting, the whole deal. Which brings me to my next point: Self-portraits=awkward. Out of an hour's worth of work i got maybe four images i am comfortable with and two (to the right) that i REALLY like. Not because i'm picky (ok... partially because i'm picky) but more so because all of the ideas i would come up with were hard to execute when you're setting the timer on the camera and hoping it's pointing to the right place. I know, life is hard right?
When i showed these images in critique, in association to my "thing/concept" (identity, memory, blah blah... i think i've babbled about it in an earlier entry), I felt like they were an obvious deviation from what i had been doing. I could have gone to the studio armed to the teeth with little random bits and baubles that are significant in my memory, but it would have been little more than shooting commercial images of objects. Boring. That's actually what happened to a lot of the people in my class, which worked better for them in most cases, but i'm not about to go make an ad for rediscovering yourself.
Self portraiture was my next option since i've avoided putting myself physically into my own work for so long. Seemed like a good opportunity to give it a shot.
I don't think i'm going to make a repeat performance any time soon.
Anyway, that's my two cents on the matter. White walls also kind of freak me out i think. There's an awesome seemless wall in the studio that our sculpture professor built out of plywood and fiberglass. It's a great workspace, but for some reason it feels really static to me. Too clean. I grew up in a house where my mom insisted that all walls would be painted white, and i proceeded to plaster posters, clippings, photos and other random things all over them. The white or black backdrops are meant to allow the focus of the photograph to be drawn to the object or person, but it sure as hell sucks out any sort of substance or context you can get concerning the subject.

A day with the darkroom

So yesterday, when the rest of the nation was waiting anxiously for the polls to close and for the ballots to start being tallied... i spent 8 hours in the darkroom... which wasn't so dark, but that's beside the point.
I worked on my Gum Bichromate project for class. Prepare to be wowed... by my utter geekiness. I'm going to give you the play by play (i'm so excited that i actually had the concentration required to not only successfully produce images, but to also compile the stage-to-stage images DURING that process).
So first off i will share the images i worked from. This tree image is actually from a 120 roll of 800ASA film i shot last year when missoula had crazy amounts of snow on one day. It's of a tree that i kind of gravitate to for my holga images... mostly because it's easy to photograph trees. they don't ask you questions or have to be directed to pose in a certain way. You kind of have to take them or leave them. the other thing is that i kind of enjoy the skeletal nature of trees w/o their leaves.
They're just aesthetically pleasing to me. *shrugs* there's a lot of easy bullshit concept and content you can draw from them as well, which is definitely nice when you just want to photograph things you like but still have to explain yourself somehow in a critique.
The other image is the one i shot with my cellphone a while back... it's in one of my earlier entries on here. not the last one, but the one before that. anyway. i'm sharing the base images b/c i think it might be easier to see what's going on in the rest of the images... i don't know, maybe i'm making it too easy.

So the first step i had to take was editing the images digitally. Sizing them, blah blah blah. Then i had to split their channels into CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK). I had to print digital negatives of three of those (because i was doing a three layer color image)
So firstly, the Cyan layer. I cheated and used cyanotype.
I probably should have underexposed these a little bit more... they came out a tad strong. But i'm also guilty of making dark prints in the first place... be it digital, silver gelatin, whatever. *Shrugs* consistency. that's what i say to that.


















I'm starting to think that the play by play here may be kind of boring. sorry 'bout that. I honestly haven't done much as far as photography is concerned... or much anything else is concerned really. Like right now, i probably should be doing reading for classes and studying some of my vocabulary for Irish because i have a test tomorrow. am i? nope.
So at this juncture i kind of spaced scanning the yellow layer of the table image... my bad.
i took a picture of the magenta layer on the tree while it was in the developing bath.














fancy yea? Notice how much lighter the one on the left looks compared to the dried and scanned version on the right... that's b/c the scanner i was using sucks at scanning images. great at scanning negs, not great with scanning 'reflective' as the scanner refers to it. go figure.
So a little on the gum process, technified: What the hell is it? the process involves light-sensitizing watercolors. They're mixed with Gum Arabic (hence the gum part) and then made light sensitive with Dichromate (nasty stuff. Carcinogen. bad for you.) I paint the mixture onto my paper (in the case of the tree above, a magenta layer over the cyanotype) and wait 20 minutes for that to dry. Then i expose it all with the negative for the magenta layer in a UV light box for five minutes. An hour after it sits in a bath of water (yep, just plain ol' H2O) the parts that weren't exposed to light via the negative wash off.
So simple and yet so brilliant!
moving on...

So since these are only three layer color images (dual-layer gum bichromates with a cyanotype base) this is actually the final step i made.


















Seems so simple, yea? took 8 hours. approximately. Just because of prep time. Then you factor in the drying time for each round because it was submerged in water each time. I even cheated occassionally and used a blow-dryer to get them ready for the next round faster.
So that's it.
I look forward to doing a few more. I have an idea for another set of them... we'll see if that works out ok.
keep you posted.

"We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect.... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs." -Aaron Siskind

"Photographers are lousy editors." -Maggie Sherwood