- To start the day, I bough my ilford paper.
Not really much I can say about today but RAD, Seriously enjoyed every minute of the black & white printing induction, collin explained everything to a tee, I found it mind blowing how the process works, Plus we got around to learning about grading, my head was about to fall off.
First things first, we created our contact sheet, I had a good start & put my paper in upside down. was good fun, but I needed to make at least one mistake.
We then run it through the machine that drags it through all its needs ( chemicals ect ) emulsion facing down.
After this, we chose a negative, learnt how to load the film, chose negative size holders ect.
then we got onto loading the negative into the machine & how to focus & resize the image on the enlarger, using the magnifier to get the perfect focus.
We all grabbed an easel & learnt how to create borders & about placing the paper.
Then we locked of the enlargers when we was happy and got around to doing some test strips.
- 5 Second exposures along the page at f.8 to start with. we did 5 exposures giving us 5 different turn outs.
We then chose what exposure we though was right & printed onto another test strip ( to save paper )
After that we got our final print ( this is all without grading, so we could just get the subject its self at a reasonable exposure.
Collin showed us how to create, I suppose its a type of back up, so when you come to printing the same photo again, you have a ruff guide line of what to do, even though he mentioned that sometimes the light might be different, Lens ect. but its a ruff guide to creating the same image again.
So after lunch we went onto learning about grading, this is where it really started to get interesting to me, I found incredable how certain lights only corrected certain colours on the image, my first thoughs was to bring the forground & edges back in, so there was a more obious border, it looked as if it was floating, so first we worked on that via a 0 grade for 10 seconds, it had some effect but not enough, so using dodging over the subject not not affect it to much we added another 10 seconds. it was nice. I then wanted to add some more Contrast to the blacks in the subject, so then used a grade 5.
- grade 2 / 19 seconds
- grade 0 / 10 seconds
- grade 0 / with dodging 10 seconds.
- grade 5 / 5 seconds
I'll leave you with three final turn outs, the last image was when we tryed everything on our own & luckily the photograph was exposed quiet nicely & Didnt have to recover anything, allthough I did muck the framing up a little, but was the end of the day.
Really had a rad day & cant wait for the colour printing induction!
oh & collin sorted me out a box for my negatives, its covered in tree's & stickers allready, Stoked!
