Darkroom
A dark room is a room designed for developing light sensitive paper into a range of photography products. Primarily used to turn rolls of film into images. Darkrooms had more demand before digital cameras became the primary type of photography. Darkrooms are interesting to me because of the history that comes with them and how they originally were the key that allowed people access to their photographs. A dark room is simply what the name insights, it is a very dark room that usually has a few different types of lights within it, one being the main lights, of course these are used when no photographic paper is exposed and no photographic work is in process, a red light, this is a much less harsh light that hardly lights up the room, this can be used to an extent in a dark room whilst photographic work is being done.
Christian schad
Christian Schad was an artist of the twentieth century, he made paintings and photographs, however, he used to make photograms that were made in a particular way, photograms are made by putting objects on top of light sensitive paper and then exposing the paper to light and where the light reaches the paper, it becomes darker and the places where it doesn't reach stays lighter. Schad developed a technique of making photograms slightly different to this, he would instead of exposing the light sensitive paper to light for only a couple of seconds, he would leave it by his windowsill to develop in the light coming through the window.
Man Ray
Man Ray was an artist of the 20th century who vastly contributed to the movements/genres of Dada and Surrealism, his work highlighted these two artistic movements. He, like lots of artists also dabbled and experiments with photography, photograms, film, this was and is for most artists a way of expressing themselves in different media. Ray managed to develop his own technique for making photograms, eventually he would expose his photograms to light multiple times with different objects each exposure, this gave his photograms a certain style which was interesting to look at, the look that he managed to give them was very layered and unique.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was an artist of the early 21st century who highly contributed to the Bauhaus movement, even being a professor at the Bauhaus school. His work consisted of paintings, sculpture and photography. The involvement in photograms that he had was that he was one of the only artists who was a part of the modern art movement that used photograms frequently throughout his work. By doing this, it sparked camera-less photography (photograms) to become a lot more popular and widely used in the art and photography work
Pierre Cordier
Developing film
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Film was the primary form of photography at one point in time which meant that dark rooms and film were more popular and people knew more about them. People in modern times use digital cameras as their primary form of photography and this has lead to the decrease in popularity of film, whilst it is still widely used, not as many have as much knowledge as we used to.
Developing film is a process that takes practice and time to learn. I find developing film interesting as it is quite a large and difficult process that people used to have to go through just simply to get photographs. |
Pinhole Cameras
Pinhole cameras are cameras that can be made by anyone with a lot of different items. The idea behind pinhole cameras is that using a box of some sort that you poke a pinhole in, you can make photographs. First you will need a container of some sort, empty cans of paint and iphone boxes are ideal, then you need to spray the inside of the box with matte black paint, to make the inside completely light non-sensitive, you may need to coat this over multiple times. The next step is to make a hole no larger than the hole that a pin would make, this is the lens, then you need to make a shutter, the shutter needs to completely stop any light coming into the container through the pinhole, to do this I used black card and black duct tape, cut out a piece of black card, big enough to cover the pinhole but small enough that the card is only a box covering the pinhole, then make a piece of tape that is the same shape only slightly bigger than the card and once you have done this, put the tape on top of the card so that there is tape running round the outside of the card, then stick this on top of the pinhole, making a shutter. After all of this put the light sensitive paper, big/small enough to fit in the camera, opposite to the pinhole and then go outside and open the shutter for a second or so, depending on the size of the camera and then shut it again, the light sensitive paper will be ready to develop and then you can see if the photo has worked.
the journeys project
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The journeys project is a task we got set where we have to document some type of journey. The initial ideas that sprung to mind were the obvious, going out for a walk, going on a bus, train, tube, all of these seemed like they had good ideas hidden inside them but I just needed to do/watch something for inspiration. Miss showed us a video by the TATE about an artist called Daido Moriyama, this gave me more creative ideas and this is when I decided what I was going to do with my journey
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my journey
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My journey was a car journey that I made to a pet shop near the Thames Barrier, I used my fish eye lens as I was interested, not in the way it made the camera move but in the way that the subjects in the camera would move, I liked how the image would move into camera and the way it would leave the circular frame of the camera was really effective and looked very nice. The main basis of my idea was, record the whole way to the pet shop and then go back out, the same route that I came and take images highlighting things of significance to me that I thought looked good or interesting.
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