Avalon in Film & Digital
The last photo elective I took to graduate was The Black & White Silver Darkroom, and it was sort of an advanced darkroom class. I went in having never shot film before but the professor was awesome and he was really patient and enthusiastic about teaching me how to develop and print and didn't make me feel stupid for asking questions (like my other film professor had--consequently I wound up dropping her class) so I'd say by the second or third assignment I had caught up and felt really confident and was on the same level as everyone else.
The cool thing about that class was that for the most part it was technique based and not concept based, so we were usually allowed to shoot whatever we wanted as long as we were developing/printing in the ways that he was teaching us.
For my final project (which I'll post eventually) I did an installment where I shot both film and digital pictures in a cemetery to see what difference it made in the atmosphere and mood of the photos. And I hadn't just chosen to do it out of thin air; I had the idea because the meter on my film camera is broken, so all semester I had been using the meter on my digital and shooting both. So every project I did for film, I have the same photos in digital/color.
THAT SAID. I started bringing my negatives into work and printing them when I get bored/when it's slow. During school I didn't have time/resources to print every single photo I shot, but I like the idea of having little copies of them instead of just having the negatives. I've had them printed for a while but the other day I decided to put them onto discs so that I can play with them in Photoshop/post them around the interwebz. I was doing them in random order so I guess if I keep posting them they'll also be in random order, but I have two rolls so far.
The one I'm going to post today was from February 2nd. I met up with Gabbi and Celeste at Avalon Park and we just walked around for a while until we were too cold to deal anymore, and our faces were red and our fingertips weren't working. They had been planning to hang out anyway and invited me, and I was like OH MAN, OLD SCHOOL, CAUSE I HAVE TO SHOOT MY HOMEWORK. They'd graduated the semester before me so they were past the days of getting together to do homework haha.
This was my second roll of film, I think?, and when I had been rolling it up to develop it I accidentally cracked it. =( Later on in the semester I wound up making some fun art with the cracked pieces and I wound up being really happy with them, but if I had put the ripped strips of negatives into the Nortisu at work it would've jammed it. So the B&W's are like half the roll that I shot. There are more digital pictures obviously because I wasn't limited to one roll of film, but also because all the film photos aren't here. Wah. =(
But you can see what I mean about how I would meter with my digital and then match the settings for the film. I was doing it especially anally in the beginning before I was feeling more confident about film and everything. I was too paranoid about wasting money if I fucked up. But here's a sample, keeping in mind that the lenses had different focal lengths so they're slightly different:
ANYWAY. Here they are.
I'm not crazy about the quality of the digital files compared to the prints. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the resolution on the prints I made but the files are grainy as hell, which sucks. I guess my stuff at work is intended for regular people and their snapshots and stuff so the quality isn't going to blow my mind and I know that. One day if I get around to it I'll have to have them made at a real lab for professionals.
