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thewayneKinda long, so it's under a cut.
Prior to Friday night's theatrical experience, I had my final Photo I class. We met to review our final project and to do course critiques. Also we got our prints back from the student art show. I entered three very good prints, I hope someday to be able to scan and post them. Anyway, our final project was six prints from at least two rolls of film that formed some form of narrative. My original thought was to do a series with the Alamogordo Police Department following the day of an officer, starting with their arrival, briefing, patrol, then stage some action shots. The final shot was to be of the tombstone of a highschool friend, Pat Briggs, who was a Phoenix policeman who died in a motorcycle accident while on duty.
This rapidly became untenable due to time constraints. I thought about doing a similar series, only with the fire department, and not ending with a tombstone. Then I started thinking about doing a day in the life of an astronomer, to wit, my wife. More accurately it would be a night in the life. So I started shooting.
I shot two rolls, mainly flash, of various aspects of her job. After developing and proofing and some initial printing, it became obvious that the shots were woefully underexposed. I don't know if there's a problem with my flash or what, but it looked like they were at least one full stop under. So I shoot rolls three and four, and I shoot a minimum of two of each shot, one at the recommended metering and one stop over. I process those and both shots look fine! So I have no idea what happened.
I’m industriously printing away last week (it was due Tuesday). Friday I realize that I don’t have enough paper to finish printing the project. So Saturday I get up somewhat bright and early and start calling around the camera stores in El Paso to see if I can find paper. I strike gold on the first call (there’s only four stores, and the alternative was a five hour drive to Albuquerque if they didn’t have it in El Paso), which was a good thing because the second store had no Kodak paper, the third store’s number was no longer in service, and the fourth store was closed.
So Saturday is occupied with driving to El Paso, finding the camera store, finding that they don’t take plastic, walking through Little Tijuana to find an ATM, getting the paper, finding a mall with a Barnes & Noble to see if anything struck me as something Russet would like as a present, then getting some food and heading home. Normally a box of 100 sheets of black & white paper (Kodak Polycontrast IV RC glossy) will run you $45 or so. That box, allowing for a slightly higher base cost, tax, and gas cost – not counting my time as a direct cost, ran me $75.
Sunday finds me back in the lab doing more printing. The project is slowly coming together, but I then realize that I’m missing one very important photograph – I hadn’t taken a shot of the telescope/mirror itself! It was in the background of one shot, but if you didn’t know what it was, you probably wouldn’t be able to identify it. So Monday AM Russet and I drive to the observatory, I shoot the better part of a roll of film, then I’m back to the darkroom.
Fortunately the shots came out great. Not only did I get the mirror shot, I re-shot the arrival shot of Russ walking up the sidewalk to the admin/operations building with the telescope enclosure behind. And conveniently they were swapping out liquid nitrogen tanks that day (they’re taken down the mountain to be refilled on Monday, brought back up on Tuesday), so there is this dark square at the bottom of the telescope where the truck is – the truck is a diesel semi flatbed, i.e. big, and in comparison with the total height of the telescope dome, it’s less than one sixth of its height. Nice little scale comparison.
It takes about an hour to develop one roll of film. Conveniently I had other prints to work on while the film was drying. By the time the lab had closed, I’d finished all my prints, gotten dry mount paper tacked onto the back of each print, trimmed each print, and had calculated the spacing for centering on a mat board. I didn’t have enough time to actually mount them, but the assignment wasn’t due until the end of class Tuesday, so I was doing OK.
After I got home Monday night I spent some time with a new little friend: an electronic label printer. I wanted to add titles to my prints. Some of them were obvious: Arrival, Ascension (as Russ walks up the stairs to the equipment level of the telescope), etc. I really liked three titles: Sixteen Minutes At Midnight, The Ghost of Telescope Operators Present, and Weave Little Stars Into My Sleep. The first print was a 16 minute exposure that I made in the dome with my 24mm lens, it was after 10pm, but Midnight sounded much more poetic. Some very cool star streaks. The second was a shot I made in the control room: the room itself is well-exposed and there’s a ghost image of Russet with a blurred streak behind her. It was a tripod-mounted three second exposure with flash: the three seconds was the correct exposure of the room, and the flash caught the initial light exposure of Russ and the streak as she pushed away from the keyboard. The third title was for a shot of Russet asleep in bed with an eye mask on with daylight coming through the window. She always sleeps with not only an eye mask but also with ear plugs in so that she can sleep all day without interruption. I didn’t know what to name the print, so I used Yahoo and searched for stars and sleep, and it came up with Weave Little Stars Into My Sleep, it’s a book of native American Indian lullabies. I thought it was coolly appropriate.
Monday night I also printed up the data sheets that I needed to complete the assignment. Said sheets consist of two parts: a shooting data sheet that lists all the exposures and comments for every frame shot, this goes into the negative sleeve holder along with a proof sheet of the roll so that I can quickly visually identify them, the other is what I call an assignment sheet that lists every frame and the individual exposure information. Since these shots came from four different rolls, it was important to keep them straight. The fifth roll, actually I think it was the second roll shot, had no frames used.
Tuesday I go in, mount all the prints, affix all the labels, and turn them in. I’m home by 4pm. As it turns out, I’m the first one to turn in my project, so that was cool. I also got extra credit for it – we were supposed to turn in six prints and I did ten. I didn’t know it, but the extra four prints gave me extra credit!
Friday night we have our critique. We display our prints in the front of the class and everyone comments on them. I went second and got a pretty good reaction. The teacher thought I did an excellent job and particularly liked both the narrative titles and the star photo, she didn’t think that a 16 minute exposure would produce anything with ASA 100 film.
Between getting an A for my final project, which was 25% of my grade, and the four extra prints, I pulled an A- for the class. It would have been higher except I had some equipment problems, i.e. two camera bodies dying on me, which made two projects late enough to get a C and a C-, and those two projects were 30% of my grade. The other projects were two B- and one A, but those three together were 30%. The two tests were easy, I got a 98 or 99% on one and 100% on the other.
So a very good class all-in-all. :-)
I’m taking a portraiture class in the spring, hopefully I won’t have any equipment problems to delay me this time!
Prior to Friday night's theatrical experience, I had my final Photo I class. We met to review our final project and to do course critiques. Also we got our prints back from the student art show. I entered three very good prints, I hope someday to be able to scan and post them. Anyway, our final project was six prints from at least two rolls of film that formed some form of narrative. My original thought was to do a series with the Alamogordo Police Department following the day of an officer, starting with their arrival, briefing, patrol, then stage some action shots. The final shot was to be of the tombstone of a highschool friend, Pat Briggs, who was a Phoenix policeman who died in a motorcycle accident while on duty.
This rapidly became untenable due to time constraints. I thought about doing a similar series, only with the fire department, and not ending with a tombstone. Then I started thinking about doing a day in the life of an astronomer, to wit, my wife. More accurately it would be a night in the life. So I started shooting.
I shot two rolls, mainly flash, of various aspects of her job. After developing and proofing and some initial printing, it became obvious that the shots were woefully underexposed. I don't know if there's a problem with my flash or what, but it looked like they were at least one full stop under. So I shoot rolls three and four, and I shoot a minimum of two of each shot, one at the recommended metering and one stop over. I process those and both shots look fine! So I have no idea what happened.
I’m industriously printing away last week (it was due Tuesday). Friday I realize that I don’t have enough paper to finish printing the project. So Saturday I get up somewhat bright and early and start calling around the camera stores in El Paso to see if I can find paper. I strike gold on the first call (there’s only four stores, and the alternative was a five hour drive to Albuquerque if they didn’t have it in El Paso), which was a good thing because the second store had no Kodak paper, the third store’s number was no longer in service, and the fourth store was closed.
So Saturday is occupied with driving to El Paso, finding the camera store, finding that they don’t take plastic, walking through Little Tijuana to find an ATM, getting the paper, finding a mall with a Barnes & Noble to see if anything struck me as something Russet would like as a present, then getting some food and heading home. Normally a box of 100 sheets of black & white paper (Kodak Polycontrast IV RC glossy) will run you $45 or so. That box, allowing for a slightly higher base cost, tax, and gas cost – not counting my time as a direct cost, ran me $75.
Sunday finds me back in the lab doing more printing. The project is slowly coming together, but I then realize that I’m missing one very important photograph – I hadn’t taken a shot of the telescope/mirror itself! It was in the background of one shot, but if you didn’t know what it was, you probably wouldn’t be able to identify it. So Monday AM Russet and I drive to the observatory, I shoot the better part of a roll of film, then I’m back to the darkroom.
Fortunately the shots came out great. Not only did I get the mirror shot, I re-shot the arrival shot of Russ walking up the sidewalk to the admin/operations building with the telescope enclosure behind. And conveniently they were swapping out liquid nitrogen tanks that day (they’re taken down the mountain to be refilled on Monday, brought back up on Tuesday), so there is this dark square at the bottom of the telescope where the truck is – the truck is a diesel semi flatbed, i.e. big, and in comparison with the total height of the telescope dome, it’s less than one sixth of its height. Nice little scale comparison.
It takes about an hour to develop one roll of film. Conveniently I had other prints to work on while the film was drying. By the time the lab had closed, I’d finished all my prints, gotten dry mount paper tacked onto the back of each print, trimmed each print, and had calculated the spacing for centering on a mat board. I didn’t have enough time to actually mount them, but the assignment wasn’t due until the end of class Tuesday, so I was doing OK.
After I got home Monday night I spent some time with a new little friend: an electronic label printer. I wanted to add titles to my prints. Some of them were obvious: Arrival, Ascension (as Russ walks up the stairs to the equipment level of the telescope), etc. I really liked three titles: Sixteen Minutes At Midnight, The Ghost of Telescope Operators Present, and Weave Little Stars Into My Sleep. The first print was a 16 minute exposure that I made in the dome with my 24mm lens, it was after 10pm, but Midnight sounded much more poetic. Some very cool star streaks. The second was a shot I made in the control room: the room itself is well-exposed and there’s a ghost image of Russet with a blurred streak behind her. It was a tripod-mounted three second exposure with flash: the three seconds was the correct exposure of the room, and the flash caught the initial light exposure of Russ and the streak as she pushed away from the keyboard. The third title was for a shot of Russet asleep in bed with an eye mask on with daylight coming through the window. She always sleeps with not only an eye mask but also with ear plugs in so that she can sleep all day without interruption. I didn’t know what to name the print, so I used Yahoo and searched for stars and sleep, and it came up with Weave Little Stars Into My Sleep, it’s a book of native American Indian lullabies. I thought it was coolly appropriate.
Monday night I also printed up the data sheets that I needed to complete the assignment. Said sheets consist of two parts: a shooting data sheet that lists all the exposures and comments for every frame shot, this goes into the negative sleeve holder along with a proof sheet of the roll so that I can quickly visually identify them, the other is what I call an assignment sheet that lists every frame and the individual exposure information. Since these shots came from four different rolls, it was important to keep them straight. The fifth roll, actually I think it was the second roll shot, had no frames used.
Tuesday I go in, mount all the prints, affix all the labels, and turn them in. I’m home by 4pm. As it turns out, I’m the first one to turn in my project, so that was cool. I also got extra credit for it – we were supposed to turn in six prints and I did ten. I didn’t know it, but the extra four prints gave me extra credit!
Friday night we have our critique. We display our prints in the front of the class and everyone comments on them. I went second and got a pretty good reaction. The teacher thought I did an excellent job and particularly liked both the narrative titles and the star photo, she didn’t think that a 16 minute exposure would produce anything with ASA 100 film.
Between getting an A for my final project, which was 25% of my grade, and the four extra prints, I pulled an A- for the class. It would have been higher except I had some equipment problems, i.e. two camera bodies dying on me, which made two projects late enough to get a C and a C-, and those two projects were 30% of my grade. The other projects were two B- and one A, but those three together were 30%. The two tests were easy, I got a 98 or 99% on one and 100% on the other.
So a very good class all-in-all. :-)
I’m taking a portraiture class in the spring, hopefully I won’t have any equipment problems to delay me this time!
