Up dates

Not blogged for a while as college has finished for the year but I have not been idle. I guess the first thing to announce is my first competition win. Wilkinson Cameras operate a monthly competition and last months theme was movement or long exposure. I decided to enter my escalator shot that I took at Central Station.

Although there were not that many entrants I am pleased to have won. Even more pleased with the £50 voucher I got as a prize. 

This months theme is Architecture and I have submitted an old image that I took of Mersey Harbour Board. It is digital altered and not the best image in the world but the only architecture shot I had in my back catalogue that I felt was good enough.

Other news is that I think I am moving away from doing nudes. I have recently been looking at some of the landscapes I have done. Messed around with some of them and come to the conclusion that I like doing landscapes even more now. Wonder what other people think though.

I am looking at the scope for producing high end limited edition prints of some landscapes. I will need to produce some more work first but I quite like the start I have made.

Busy Busy Week for College

Extremely busy week for college. Loads of work done and thought I had better share a bit of it on here.
Where to start? Guess with the fashion shoot. Part of Ed's module this semester is to do fashion. I arranged with a local designer to do some work using her designs and organised a model to come to the studio. The deal between all three was copies of the images to do as they wished. Here are my four favourites from the shoot.

Next thing to be completed was the Fuji Colour Of competition. This was one of those things that, in the end I decided I had bitten of more than I could chew. Eventually got it finished in time but not overly pleased with the end result.

And last but not least, I developed and printed the film version of the images I took at Keswick. Of these I am extremely pleased with my little self.

Old image

I was going through my back catalogue looking for an image when I came across another that I had taken nearly three years ago, long before I even considered doing an HND. Now bearing in mind that we have to do product photography, I thought I would cheat and throw it into the mix too. As far as I can remember, I initially wanted to try and get reflections on a picture, but do it in camera. I had seen a few images on line of models shot in a studio with a reflection done in Photoshop but always preferring to do it as much in camera as possible I thought I would look in to how it might be possible.
The vast majority of the images I had seen where low light using black backgrounds. I decided to stick with this, the main reason being that to achieve a reflection I had to essentially make a mirror. I set up the black background and on a table placed a black A2 piece of card. On top of the card I placed a sheet of glass from a picture frame and placed the bottle etc on that. The lighting was from one of my own flash heads. To get the best reflection, I knew I had to place the light above the subject and at a roughly 45 degree angle to the front.
At the time I was not planning on doing an HND so did not save any editing details. But, if memory serves there was not much other than a crop and levels and adding the writing etc.

New cameras

With the recent disasters I have had with borrowed gear and film, I decided to buy some new film cameras.

Split Filtering

The photographic paper we have been using so far in the darkroom is “multi-grade”, which has been around since the 1940’s. Before this multi-grade, paper used to come in 5 grades, each one varying in the level of contrast. A grade 1 paper would be used to ensure detail in the hi-lights is clearly visible. However, it would then have no detail in the shadow areas. A grade 5 on the other hand would do the reverse. Shadow detail would be great but the hi-lights would be blown. A grade 3 would be great for mid tones but hi-lights and shadows would be lost. These single grades of paper had just on layer and would be sensitive to blue light.

Multi-grade is made up of 3 layers with the additional layer being sensitive to green light in varying degrees. By adjusting the amount of green light you can alter the contrast of the image, this is done of course with the use of a magenta filter in the enlarger.

We can however, gain more control of the contrast with the use of split filtering process. Rather than using the built in filter on an enlarger, graded filters can be used to control and adjust the contrast. Filters come in grades that essentially mimic the old single graded papers from 0 to 5. Split filtering is where you would use two of the filters to balance and enhance the contrast of your image.

As part of the Fuji competition I had selected Fuji Neopan CN41 film to use. This was to be printed on colour paper. However, I also took some more images on the roll and took them into the darkroom to print black and white. I have to say that I was extremely disappointed in the results.

After going through the process of test strips for timings and varying levels of magenta to add some contrast the result was a rather flat image. 

I think the reason for this is the design of the film. With an ISO of 400 it is however designed to be very forgiving and can be pushed or pulled anywhere between 100 and 800 without any serious loss of quality and retaining detail in the shadows and hi-lights. The downside to this is a lack of contrast and a flat image

This made these images a prime candidate to try out split filtering on. Our first attempt was not too successful. Steve had suggested that as my first print was at a 10 second exposure, for the split filtering it needed dividing in to two. Five seconds each for the 0 grade filter and 5 grade filter. From the image left however, this came out heavily under exposed. 

After a little experimentation we decided the best option was to do two separate test strips for the hi-lights and shadows. Testing for the different filters worked out much better. The image now has great tonal value through-out but also has contrast and a depth that results, essentially from a double exposure. The final settings were to use 0 grade filter for 15 seconds and then 30 seconds with the 5 grade filter.

Another image from the roll, originally printed image followed by a split filtered version.

Update on Fuji Competition.

I was quite worried when I saw the first results from using the Neopan CN41 film. Other than shooting the background for the Fuji competition, I also did some other landscapes on the film. However, when I printed them out on black and white paper, the results were a lot less than I hoped for. I wanted a deep feel to the image and thought the CN41 would give me that. Advertised as retaining great detail in both h-lights and shadows, I hoped this would give me the depth I wanted. What actually came out though was a flat image. Yes it had the detail in all the areas I wanted but as a result the contrast was compromised.

It was with baited breath then that I went into the colour darkroom to try and print my selected background. Never would I get a true black and white print using colour paper, it was always going to come out sepia. I was worried that the sepia would be even more flat and lacking any depth. After getting to grips with the colour casts I was relieved to find that, on colour paper at least, there was a decent amount of contrast and now looking forward to getting the colour portrait nailed down and completing the project.

Keswick Wooden Jetty

I decided to do a bit more editing on the jetty from Keswick. As my panorama stitching did not work I decided to do it as a crop instead, convert to black and white and see what the result would be like.