Session 4: Light Terrain
On Saturday, when the sun finally broke from behind the clouds, I almost went outside to take photos. But the day had been full of garden work and the kids were letting me read so I continued to read Station Eleven, thinking, the sun will be out tomorrow. Today, it rained all day. I never saw the sun. And so, this weeks photos were all taken at night. Each one is a photo from above of a glass I got recently with a mold of Mt. Washington in the bottom.
Failed Reflections
This first photo was an hour long exposure with the pinhole camera I made last week. I hung the box from the lamp above our dinning room table and used my cellphone to try and guess if the glass was in frame. That worked pretty well.
This week I’ve been thinking about places in our house that have good contrast as black and white film is good at capturing contrast. Most of what has good contrast is pretty boring otherwise I’ve noticed. Suspect some pictures of the side walk soon. Its bright whitish self contrasts really nicely with the grass.
As I was thinking about contrast I decided to see what full contrast on a cellphone would look like on our black table and produced the photo below. This photo is what I was trying to recreate with the pinhole. And, if I let the photo develop for another hour or two, I wonder if it would have worked.
Glass and Pen
In high school one of the first photo projects we did was to lay rolls of tape on photo paper and expose the paper to light. The darkness created by the the roll of tape creates circles on the paper that appear when the photo paper is exposed. This is the technique I tried in today’s second and third photo. This photo was exposed to a normal light bulb and my cellphones flashlight for one minute. The white solid line is a pen I attached to the film. The rest of the effect is caused light being refracted by the whiskey glass.
Emblem
After developing the photo above I decided to give this technique a second attempt using a shorter exposer to 30 seconds. I also removed the pen. To gain more control over the developer, I tried applying the it to the photo paper with a paintbrush. This worked decently and I suspect that if I used a bit more control I could get something pretty awesome with this technique. One thing I would have liked to see is the brush strokes comes into the photo.
Thanks for reading. As always, please send my any ideas of tips. This project is a lot less structured than croissants so calls for specific bits of information are hard to make. That said, any ideas you have would be great.
-MCW