Dark room experiment

Evaluating my work so far, I have come to realise that I have lots of different photographs for different shoots, which all represents or symbolises one of these three seasons summer, autumn and winter.

Glancing at these sets of images you will suddenly notice that these few photos have been taken from my previous shoots. This is because I had to use my previous work so far yo complete this experiment.

In my opinion on using the dark room for the first time during this whole unit has been different from my normal shoots because I didn't need a camera but instead all I needed was a selection of my best images. This experiments works by using a bright light to expose your images. Then you soak the exposed image into some chemicals for about 5 minutes. After this you rise it off for 30 seconds and add to a fixing solution for another 5 minutes. Finally place it to soak for 10 minutes in cold water and leave to dry. This process seem pretty straight forward, if you follow these simple guidelines. however you cannot be guaranteed perfect results ever time because sometimes it requires a trial and error process to result in a perfect finishing product.

Here are a few of my experiment which didn't turn out exactly as planed. therefore it resulted me into slightly changing the process a bit, whether it was how many layers (images on top of each other) I used, if it was exposing the image for too long or if my primary image was too dark to use.

Later on I suddenly realised that my images of buildings from Venice, sunglasses; even my chocolate pumpkins and ghosts, which result surprised me especially since I used the paper.

This is one of my images from my Venice shoot of my gelato featuring the buildings in the background. Comparing the original to the edited one you can clearly notice that my vanilla ice cream has turned into chocolate ice cream. Also the edited photo has a darker tone in the buildings and the sky. This then makes me feel like this photo was taken on the night-time and not on a bright sunny day.

Here, is one of my photos taken from my Halloween shoot. Looking at the original and edited photo you would never guess that these two images are the same picture. In the original photo the pumpkin's faces have been designed to make the pumpkin look scared. Maybe this is because its for Halloween and at this time of year people dress up as scary creatures like ghosts, pumpkins and witches or it has seen it edited version. But looking at the edited version it has a more sinister feel to it all because they facial expression doesn't look scared but it has more of a deathly look to it.

To take my work further I have decided to use special paints, which are designed especially for darkroom prints. Above is a picture taken from this experiment,originaly from my sunglasses shoot, which has been painted in a way to transform the original black and white image to a more colourful and cheerful image. What I like about this image is that the choice of colours which I feel together make the image stand out, especially the yellow used along the window sills. also I like how the brown has blended well against the black and white stripes.

However, to improve this image I feel like the sunglasses in the background should of being painted with a brighter blue to make it stand out more.