Print 9 of 10 Models @kayyteakinns and @leximiller12
Print 9 of 10
Models @kayyteakinns and @leximiller12
Aug, 2016Views
61
Likes
Awards
Outstanding Creativity
Absolute Masterpiece
Top Ranks
Top 30 rank week 2Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
Behind The Lens
Location
This photo was taken in a make shift studio set up in my friend's kitchen. The plant life double exposed over it was shot at Fredric Meijer Garden's Butterfly exhibit.Time
Because these images were taken at different times and double exposed together in the dark room I'm not entirely sure about the times they were taken...Recording better field data is something I'm still working onLighting
I wanted this image to have rich shadows so the image was set up in a darkened kitchen with a small studio lighting set borrowed from my campus equipment center. The lights were places at angles on either side of the models until their faces were lit to my desire.Equipment
This was shot with a Pentax K1000 camera with black and white film.Inspiration
I was doing a project for class and I wanted to depict these women as at one with nature. To make them seem as natural as the plants projected onto their bodies. The pose I chose for this particular shot was unlike the others in that it was less about their bodies and more about their faces and the expression portrayed...I wanted it to almost look like they were silencing each other but their eyes were still there to relay their thoughts. It touched on environmental activism for me in a way I'm still not sure how to explain.Editing
This is a scan of a silver gelatin print shot in black and white film, so all processing was done in the dark room during the exposure. The paper was exposed twice under two different enlargers with two separate negatives, each set at half the contrast it required to show the original images in the correct tonality so that when they came together their tones and shadows would meld together to create the image you see.In my camera bag
I keep my Pentax K1000 in my bag always because I just feel like sometimes an image could just be captured more purely on the black and white film. There's something elegant about it. It has a standard 50mm lens that came with the camera. and I also like to take my Nikon D3300 with me so that I'm less limited in my image captures than I am with the film, because there's only so many exposures on a roll. My lenses for the Nikon are the18-55mm and the 55-200mm Nikor lenses.Feedback
The entire experience was new to me when I was working on this project, it was mostly experimental... It took about 8 rolls of film (36 exposures each) to get enough material to put this image and the others related to the project together. So make sure you give yourself a lot of images to work with. I stared at each negative in an attempt to match the movement of the plant matter to the movement and expressions of my models before choosing the two negatives to use for the exposure. It took a lot of trial and error to set the enlargers so that the exposures came out right and none of the images had the same results so I don't think the science of it was exact but while exposing each negative onto the paper I started out exposing them at half the time it would have required to get the right tones in each image and then altered them until I liked the tones. Use Lots of small test strips! you'll run through a whole box of paper before you get three images done if you don't manage your supplies. The image of the models was exposed for longer onto the paper than the image of the plants for each print. The models had lighter tones and so they needed more exposure to show up adequately, while the images of the plants were much darker so they needed less exposure time or they would over saturate the image and make it too dark. Other than that, the rest of the dark room steps were the normal steps you follow in any photo one handbook.
