Photography 2

Week 4 at Art School - p.1

Today was our second day of Photography workshops. Since the session last week, I managed to book myself an informal session at my old laboratory to take some photos of "scientific people and scientific stuff". And I'm really glad I did! One, it gave me a chance to go visit my old friends there (and find out that I've probably got a scientific publication coming out in my name of the work I did while I was there!), and I also got to take some photos, looking at things that I spent years of my life around, but seeing them in a COMPLETELY different light. I picked up my set of processed negatives and photos this morning and here's the contact sheet (click for a larger image):


The tutor then helped everyone pick out two pictures from their sets to print bigger versions of. She marched us all to the developing room and we all got assigned an individual "enlarger" to work with each. It was very similar to stuff I'd used in my lab before so I picked up the basics fairly quick - others took abit longer to get to grips with how it worked. We all then made several "test strips" on photographic paper - testing out different exposure times (to get the best brightness for the picture), and different filters (to get the best contrast). Here's a couple of mine:


Once we were happy with our choice of exposure time and filter, we made large prints of our chosen photos. Anh here's my final results (both exposed for 43 seconds, using filter 4.0):



Art and design history lecture today was "The arts and crafts movement" - William Morris and his friends were a very interesting group of people. I also need to look up John Ruskin and his thoughts about how the Victorians needed to get away from mass-manufacturing, and get back to craftsmanship and handmade things.

In other news, one of the other parttimers managed to convince one of the tutors to give us a quick overview of his "perspective drawing" project. As parttimers we don't get to do it - but several of us were interested so he agreed to quickly talk us through what he does with the fulltime students. "Quickly talk through" became an hour-and-a-quarter long fascinating talk! Here are some sketches I made during the talk: