darkroom delerium

Well after an absolute mission trying to type up my written submission in time for yesterday evening to go with my six final images (which by the way YES! I totally completed on Tuesday. Booyah.), the first year of the Pro-cert is over! Yes, it involved me waking up at 4.20 and writing my fingers into future carpal tunnel syndrome, but it all got completed in time (for once! The whole reason I ended up with a 2:2 at my first degree in Sheffield was not through lack of brains, it was entirely through the deduction of marks for lateness. I can prove it. One essay I had FIFTEEN marks removed. I have issues with deadlines).

Our final impromptu workshop last night was a mounting class (tee-hee!), then we all went for a drinkie in The Orange Tree on Shakespeare Street, which is really cool but ridiculously overpriced for a student watering hole. And DON'T give me all that crap about buying into a student card, if you were cheap, you'd be cheap. But it is nice. But buying a round meant remortgatging my camera collection. Anyway, it felt great to go and chat with my fellow students, or 'comrades' as our Student Rep Chris affectionately refers to us as. We met our Tutor-To-Be for the new year, Karen, who will be teaching us about the fine art digital print. Exciting, seeing as most of my work is done in digital. Though my new found love for darkrooms will live on. Then everyone got a bit sozzled and ended up in a somewhat heated debate about the purism of wildlife photography (Iain from the course is a wonderful wildlife photographer. You should see what he can do in six hours with a puffin) and whether or not it's cheating if you lure the animal with food to get the dream shot. Iain thinks it is, and he will not compromise on how he gets his images; he really takes time to get to know an animal and its habits in its natural environment before he takes a shot. It proved for a very interesting discussion! I personally said I didn't bother me if he fed the animal or not, but he feels that part of the main selling point for his images is the story behind them. Amazingly purist!

Aside from that, Nick, who takes architechtural pictures and is influenced by fine artists like Kandinsky (honestly, I've never seen a rooftop look so graceful), and I were remembering how, in the delerium of the darkroom on Tuesday, we'd been playing my favourite game, innuendo bingo (it's fun to play by yourself, and with friends...innuendo bingo!). It's unbelievably easy in the darkroom (innuendo bingo!). By the end of Tuesday I was fully insane and everything was hilarious. 8 hours in redlight will do that for you. If you've never played innuendo bingo before, you're in for a treat. It's basically when you say something quite innocently but it can be interpreted as a sexual innuendo. Or it just sounds a bit naughty. Then the game is to be the first person to shout INNUENDO BINGO! as loud as you can. I always win. I rule at this game. I will add though, by way of a disclaimer, that if you say ANYTHING in the right tone, it sounds dodgy.

• Can you turn me over, please?
• Can you put me in the wash?
• Wash me.
  
• Hmm, creamy texture. (Fibrebased, matt finish paper)
• Shall I use the tongs?
• It's too small! Make it bigger!
• There's not a lot going on in the trouser area, it needs dodging
• Do it with your hand
• Ohh, it's a bit soft.
• Put it in for me.
• Put me in too.

It's even funnier in the pitch black, when you're actually processing your film. It's so fiddly (innuendo bingo!) and you have to do it all in the dark (innuendo bingo!). If you've never processed your own film before, you have to take your film out of your camera, cut open the cannister with an old fashioned tin opener, using scissors you have to cut off the end (er, does that count? Maybe as an S&M innuendo bingo!), then feed it into the film reel and wind it on, then put it in the black processing tub, then you can switch the light back on and insert your chemicals. Then you have to swish it about every thirty seconds for about ten years. It's really methodical and I didn't like it very much at all. But my first time was in the pitch black room with Iain and Sam (now that is probably the easiest innuendo bingo of the post) and it was hilarious because it was so difficult and Sam has the most ridiculous sense of humour I've ever encountered.

• Is it in yet?
• I can't do it on my own, just help me!
• Can you feel it?
• That's the end
• Cut it off
• Just be gentle with it, it'll come.
• What's that?
• Give it to me....etc.,
  

Ahh the sweet joy of immaturity. I simply never grow weary of it. And it's so easy! I mean the module title was 'Exploiting the Darkroom'! Hilarity ensued.

darkrooms and the depths of despair...

Tommorow is my final day of darkroom printing for my black and white photography module at NTU. It's an important day. Last Tuesday I arrived at 10am and left at 8.30pm (with a somewhat over-extended break for lunch with my interesting friend Adamski). Even with the break, you still go a little bit bonkers when you're confined to a small space with dim red light and the constant sound of running water for many, many hours, especially when you know up top it's super sunny (a rarity in England!) and everyone is eating ice cream and drinking beer in the park. Having said that, I still only managed to get three decent prints out of last Tuesday and I need six for my final submission, so think of me tomorrow, squirrelled away in the bowels of the Bonnington building, singing made up songs and generally reminding the rest of my class the reasons behind why they all think I'm a little bit strange.

It is immensley fun though, playing in the darkroom. There's something incredibly satisfying about setting up your englarger, organising your negatives, making your test strips, sloshing them about in developer, then stop, then fixer. Then washing and drying, squinting at your print in the fluorescent lights outside the darkroom like a mole. At the end of the process, you feel so very attached to the little prints, that you cherish each one like a child. I love every imperfection, the curled up edges once it's dry, an accidental slice of black border creeping in the shot, a squiggly white line of dust from the neg. You end up giving a deep sigh and thinking, ah well, here we go again then. I'm very new to it all. We've been darkroom developing for 11 weeks. In the cheesy yet immortal words of Princess Jasmine and Aladdin, it's a whole new world.

The course is new too; we are the Professional Certificate in Photography guinea pigs. Because it's a part time night class, there's a wide variation in fellow students. At 25, I'm the youngest and one of only two girls. I would honestly say I'm the least experienced too. I had virtually no understanding of film photography, I cut my teeth on digital, with a Canon EOS 400D, which was given to me as a Christmas present in 2006. Now I have a 10D, which I use for weddings and things. I love my 10D. I love my newest purchase even more, the Canon Speedlite 580ex. It's a sexy, sexy flash. I find the best results for people shots is to strap on an Omnibounce, twist it up but facing backwards one notch, and whack the camera on Auto. Honestly, it sounds like cheating, but you get amazing results.

But anyway, we're getting very off-topic. The pictures I'm developing were taken with a Mamiya RZ-67. I don't need to say anything else other than that. The camera is quite simply, exquisite. I can only apologise for the inexperience of the photographer. I'm a little unhappy with how the shadows worked out. I set up two spotlights pointing in the centre of the studio wall, to try and create a circular backdrop behind the models, then used an overhead softbox to light the foreground. But it's created distracting double shadows, which I've had to dodge out when printing. I decided to print on Ilford Multigrade IV Fibre Based Matt, which I think lends the pictures a depth and softness which almost makes them look like 1920's Hollywood stars. That sounds hugely pretentious. But it does! In comparison to resin coated papers, it's a world apart. I tried a couple of shots with Lomo fibre based matt paper, but you just couldn't retain the sharpness in the detail. I suppose that's why Ilford are so popular...they're amazing! The models are a group of girls I know; I went to school with Alice, the Sailor, and now I'm friends with all the others too! We're collaborating on a really interesting project in Derby, which will hopefully extend further afield in time, looking at gender and the reactions people have to androgyny or mixed gender signifiers; we're exploring the idea of female masculinity. The models are primarily lesbians who dress in drag, not half heartedly either. They glue on beards and go out in public, and I follow them and take pictures. If you're interested, click here. Or just keep coming back, because despite the fact that my module's almost finished, my interest and work with the Drag Kings of Derby is ongoing...

p.s. I apologise for the quality of the scans. I haven't quite got the hold of it yet. For some reason the up close one has come out on an angle and the full body picture is blurred around the face and hand...