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It started raining last night around 3am, apparently Demming got TWO INCHES. That's going to be a heck of a lot of mud if you're familiar with the area. It's rained here off and on most of the day, right now it's off. I just let the dog out to do her poodle piddles and it's 49f, which is slightly cold (it was 41f last week one day at 10am!), but the wind is literally whistling through the trees, and things like that can really make it all worth it.
School is going fairly well, had my second algebra test Thursday and my first photography test Tuesday, I'm pretty sure I did better on the algebra test than I did on my first on which I scored an 80. I'll be perfectly content if I pull a B on algebra, it's not my major and it's not my interest.
Photography is going QUITE well. I'm printing better than I've ever done before. Even though I've been shooting for over 25 years, I've missed out on some fundamentals because my first teacher was an idiot and didn't really teach anything significant. So I'm now applying better shooting/printing techniques to my already well-developed eye for composition, and I really like the prints I'm producing.
My problem is quantity. It can take over an hour to produce one really good black and white print. The key word here is "can", it varies depending on the print. Once you determine the proper exposure through test strips and test prints, then you have to work with burning and dodging the print which increases and decreases the amount of time on any given area of said print. For example, I have this one print that takes a 9 second exposure in the enlarger. There are two areas that require a +50% burn because they're a little light. On top of that, there's this one area within that burn area that needs an additional +50% burn. So this one little area that's maybe 1.5" by .5" needs double the exposure of the rest of the print. Then your chemical time for developing the print is five minutes. Then you rinse the print off, put it in a tray (so it doesn't drop chemicals all over the floor) and walk out and inspect it in bright light. When you find you need to make an adjustment, then you have to re-focus the enlarger because it will sometimes shift a bit, lather, rinse, repeat.
It takes a lot of time to print black and white!
I lost about a week of class time because of my cameras dying and not having received my replacement, so I couldn't shoot assignments. I get the camera and also shortly thereafter get a cold. I can shoot and develop the film (developing is simpler than printing but it takes a while (30-45 minutes to develop one or two rolls)), but it's simple and monotonous and doesn't require the concentration that printing does. I'm one print short of finishing our third assignment, unfortunately the shots that I thought would work don't because the lens that was dropped is definitely out of alignment.
So I started shooting another roll Friday to cover the missing shot, unfortunately I didn’t finish or process the roll, so no printing.
The second assignment, which is over a month overdue, I have to do something on the order of 19 prints for. That’s A LOT of darkroom time! I need to finish that puppy ASAP, and to compound matters, my parents arrive tomorrow and I’ll probably be expected to spend time up here rather than down the mountain in the darkroom. And don’t forget that any trip down or up the mountain is a half an hour.
LOTS of miles! But also lots of fun, I’m really enjoying photography.
I have a couple of computer things to do. One is to get a SCSI card so I can hook up a film scanner and scan my negatives, then I can play with them in Photoshop and see what I can do. That won't cost too much, and I have $70 credit with Amazon, so I'll look at ordering one today. The other is to get a good flat bed scanner so I can scan my finished prints and show them to friends. I don't know how well some of the subtleties will come through, but we'll hope for the best.
School is going fairly well, had my second algebra test Thursday and my first photography test Tuesday, I'm pretty sure I did better on the algebra test than I did on my first on which I scored an 80. I'll be perfectly content if I pull a B on algebra, it's not my major and it's not my interest.
Photography is going QUITE well. I'm printing better than I've ever done before. Even though I've been shooting for over 25 years, I've missed out on some fundamentals because my first teacher was an idiot and didn't really teach anything significant. So I'm now applying better shooting/printing techniques to my already well-developed eye for composition, and I really like the prints I'm producing.
My problem is quantity. It can take over an hour to produce one really good black and white print. The key word here is "can", it varies depending on the print. Once you determine the proper exposure through test strips and test prints, then you have to work with burning and dodging the print which increases and decreases the amount of time on any given area of said print. For example, I have this one print that takes a 9 second exposure in the enlarger. There are two areas that require a +50% burn because they're a little light. On top of that, there's this one area within that burn area that needs an additional +50% burn. So this one little area that's maybe 1.5" by .5" needs double the exposure of the rest of the print. Then your chemical time for developing the print is five minutes. Then you rinse the print off, put it in a tray (so it doesn't drop chemicals all over the floor) and walk out and inspect it in bright light. When you find you need to make an adjustment, then you have to re-focus the enlarger because it will sometimes shift a bit, lather, rinse, repeat.
It takes a lot of time to print black and white!
I lost about a week of class time because of my cameras dying and not having received my replacement, so I couldn't shoot assignments. I get the camera and also shortly thereafter get a cold. I can shoot and develop the film (developing is simpler than printing but it takes a while (30-45 minutes to develop one or two rolls)), but it's simple and monotonous and doesn't require the concentration that printing does. I'm one print short of finishing our third assignment, unfortunately the shots that I thought would work don't because the lens that was dropped is definitely out of alignment.
So I started shooting another roll Friday to cover the missing shot, unfortunately I didn’t finish or process the roll, so no printing.
The second assignment, which is over a month overdue, I have to do something on the order of 19 prints for. That’s A LOT of darkroom time! I need to finish that puppy ASAP, and to compound matters, my parents arrive tomorrow and I’ll probably be expected to spend time up here rather than down the mountain in the darkroom. And don’t forget that any trip down or up the mountain is a half an hour.
LOTS of miles! But also lots of fun, I’m really enjoying photography.
I have a couple of computer things to do. One is to get a SCSI card so I can hook up a film scanner and scan my negatives, then I can play with them in Photoshop and see what I can do. That won't cost too much, and I have $70 credit with Amazon, so I'll look at ordering one today. The other is to get a good flat bed scanner so I can scan my finished prints and show them to friends. I don't know how well some of the subtleties will come through, but we'll hope for the best.
