Into the Darkroom

           To me, the darkroom allows me to really explore photography. I feel the whole process of using a film camera and then having to process and use an enlarger to develop pictures is a very meaningful experience. Before the year started I thought that I would just want to do digital photography but I find that being in the darkroom is a great experience to explore new areas of photography. Especially after yesterday, the feeling after getting a successful print is really awesome. In the darkroom there tends to a lot of anxiety as I place prints into the developer waiting for them to come out. I think this applies much more to the pinhole camera project because you have one picture only. Before going into the darkroom and developing prints I always thought that film cameras and pictures were much easier to make, but that was definitely not true. Taking film photographs and then having to develop them is a long process in which I feel that I kinda get attached to the photos, unlike digital photography where I can take thousands of pictures but with a film camera you only have so many and then with those few, you can tinker and make each one look the way I want it to, in the darkroom. I am definitely looking forward to working in the darkroom over the semester.

Pinhole Cameras

Reflection of Pinhole Camera Project:

          Choices that I made in the creation of my pinhole camera were, one, how it was going to be light tight because it was a clear box and also the shutter. I attempted to make it light tight by spray painting it but that didn't entirely work so resorted to the use of tape which, eventually worked. In the pursuit of intriguing pinhole photographs, I found that using the different lighting and the amount of exposer time could really change the photo greatly. I also had a cool unexpected feature of my pinhole camera causing the affect of an 'X' down the middle of my photo because of the light leaks somewhere in my camera which I thought was pretty neat. I found this project meaningful to me because I think I came to appreciate and gain a greater understanding of photography. I always thought it was just take a picture (even though a lot of effort could go into one picture) and move on to the next intriguing thing that I saw using a digital camera, but with the pinhole there were many hardships and things that I had to experiment with and overcome to have a picture turn out.

         Throughout the project I left my intentions very open so that I could go which ever way I seemed best at the time. But a something that definitely got me off course was the fact that I had a lot of trouble getting my object to be light tight. But I eventually managed to get it almost completely light tight. Ways I might have approached this project differently would have been to choose a larger object that is easier to make light tight. This would have allowed me to have more time to take pictures rather than working on the camera itself. I also would have made the pinhole smaller to get sharper images because some of the images I saw that were very sharp really caught my eye.