Black and White and Read All Over
Back in high school, one of my favorite classes was the photography course I took my senior year. The school had its own photo lab, complete with darkroom & developing equipment. For a modest fee, you could buy lots of hand-rolled film and use the darkroom any time you wanted outside of your regularly scheduled class hours. I spent a lot of time there.
Nowadays, everyone's transitioning to digital cameras. While these might provide your instant gratification junkies with their pictures right this second, there is a lot to be said for the whole photo development process. You learn patience while hand-developing your film. You learn how to take your negatives and evaluate which ones would look good as small pictures, and which ones would need to be 8x10 or larger to really "pop". You play with enlargers and photo paper and learn how to develop the resulting photos in trays of developer and water, and wait anxiously for them to dry so you can mount and mat them. You spend time with your classmates, not staring at a monitor or transforming in Photoshop, but chatting over the cleanup of buckets of chemicals and snips of paper on the floor. I miss being a part of all of that.
I had a few rolls of film left over when I graduated that I never got a chance to use or develop. I took pictures on them over the next few years here and there, and then left them sitting in my sock drawer, thinking I'd get a home darkroom setup one day to continue my photo efforts. But it never happened, and last month I finally decided to pay the piper to get the film developed before it went bad. These are the cream of the crop from the three rolls, for your viewing pleasure:
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Comments
I took a photography class and loved spending time in the lab. there is just something about developing your own b&w film. expen$ive as it is.
lovely pics.
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[waves to Mr. Betz] I think I should add you to my neighborhood. being that you have joined ross in beating the pants off me in Scrabble...
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Wow, these are really good, Ross, especially considering you were in high school.
I like digital photography because I never got the hang of the technical side of film photography. I like to take photos but I like to be able to take good pics without having to think. (how I like to do pretty much everything)
These are really good. I'm quite envious of your eye!
I enjoyed my photography classes in college, but I quickly learned that I have difficulty "translating" into black and white. We spent the better part of a term on B&W photography, and the best grade I could manage was a C+. Compared to my classmates' work, I felt that was generous. I did much better in color, though, and I did well with composition. My professor told me I would make a much better critic than an artist. He's probably right.
With my digital SLR, I can practice and work on developing my eye. One of these days I'd like to try my hand at 35mm again. Exposure and developing was certainly a lot of fun!
Great photos!
When I was young, my dad used to set up a darkroom in our bathroom. We'd make pinhole cameras (only takes 20 minutes to expose one photo!) and then develop the film in the bathroom.
It was awesome.
My favorite is the last, the boy & the balloon.
you have a great eye. :)
I always wanted to take Photography, but our scholl didn't have a black room so i couldn't - these are great photos! Well done. Thanks for giving me a smile at something lovely today. :o)
However, as I'm sure you know, there's a difference between B&W photography and "taking pictures in black & white" - it seems with the onset of digital photography, there's been a glut of folks that think that B&W == artistic, and produce a plethora of mediocre B&W photos. (I'm guilty of this myself at times, which is why I only showed my BEST 10 shots out of about 70 on the three rolls). One benefit to the age of B&W film was every shot was a little more costly, so you took a little more time and effort to make sure your shot counted. You can get there by treating your digital camera the same way, but it's a lot more tempting to just take 100 photos in the hopes that 5 or 10 come out very nicely.
Lighting was really my achilles heel. I couldn't see shadows unless they were obvious. Even now, some of my favorite shots don't look "right" in B&W, even though the composition is good and the lighting is just right. Once it's in B&W, the shadows seem to disappear.
I love B&W photography, and you're quite right - there's a definite difference between photos in black and white and the art of black and white photography. It drives me nuts whenever I order pictures and I'm given an option of B&W, sepia or color. Very few photos translate well from color into black and white, and many terrific B&W photos lose some of their power in color.
And this is why I was told I would make a better critic than an artist...