End of Photography Class

For the past few months I have been taking a photography class on B/W Film Photography. I have thoroughly enjoyed the entire class and have definitely exponentially expanded my photographic skill base and knowledge pool. I am also beginning to understand what it means to have an expensive pastime. With cooking, you can always buy food cheaper or go to markets to get better deals, and even when that doesn't work, you can also just work with random stuff you have. However, that is not the case with photography. Especially when shooting film, the equipment (cameras and lenses), the medium (rolls of film), and the product (either computer programmes or photosensitive paper) becomes very expensive very quickly. It is possible to cut corners and such, but those "cost-saving measures" become very apparent, very fast.

However, for one of the first times in my life, I think I have really found a hobby - something that I feel okay spending inordinate amounts of my time (and money) on doing. On that interesting note, I started the class with one camera a 30+ year old Canon AE-1 with 50mm kit lens that belonged to my father, a flash that didn't work, a few filters, a 2x teleconverter, and a broken 75-210mm lens and now I own four camera bodies (two Canon AE-1, a Minolta X-700, and a Minolta SRT 101) four 50mm kit lenses a 28mm F2.8, 49mm F2.8, 135 F2.8 400mm F2.8 28-70mm F3.5-4.5, 75-210 F3.5, 85-205mm F2.8-5.4, 60-300mm F3.4-5.4, three 2x teleconverters, 4 flashes, an inordinate amount/variety of filters, two camera covers, three camera bags, a set of special glass magnifying filters, a mini-tripod, and three triggers. The best part about this is though family gifts and an amazing deal on Craigslist, I got everything I own for $120.

But back to the class, throughout the past few months I have been very busy doing work for it and trying to force my way through the learning curve for printing film. I have learned the hard way about all the various finicky aspects of film (light leaks, camera malfunctions, film inserted the backwards) and have spent countless hours reshooting and reshooting my projects. That being said, I have enjoyed every minute of it.

There is such an indescribable joy about walking out of a dark room after an entire night spent working with the perfect print in one hand and being greeted by the sun rising through the windows. It was those long nights that really made the class so worth it for me and because of that — even though it stole my life, even though I was always running around, and even though it is expensive — there is no way I will stop shooting film and taking classes.

The final assignment for the class was actually to upload all of the projects that I did during the class, with their accompanying statements. Additionally, what I decided to do was to upload all of my negatives that I didn't print for the projects to really round out my photographic journey.

The links to all of these can be found below.

In the end, looking back at the beginning of the class I came in thinking that I really knew photography even though all I had was trial-and-error and a good deal of intuition. Now that I have finished I have since discovered that those two are extremely important, but only one small part of a very big puzzle; More than anything, I have just re-enforced my belief that you can and should never stop learning, no matter what you're doing.

PROJECTS:

In all of these links you will find the various projects that I did for the class. Each one shows all of the final printed images and the negative scans from the projects, as well contains a link to the rest of the project negatives.

Experimenting Projects

Mapping Project

Emulation Project

Persona Project

Utopia Project

B/W Photography Project 2: Mapping Project

A map is an item that tells you about something. It can tell you about a space, a location, where to drive, or the torrid history of someone's love life. The point of this project was to choose something, and then, quite simply, 'map' it.

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When I first head about the 'mapping' project, I decide that I wanted use Harkness Kitchen as my subject. Harkness is my house and I feel a deep connection t it, but a lot of people have a very skewed impression of what goes on there and who we are. Much of this project is about trying to rectify that by showing a different, more intimate view.

To this end, I shot, developed, and scanned nine rolls of film taken during all the meals, during clean-up crew, or after everyone had left, in the middle of the night. Unfortunately due to time constraints and problems with my negatives (light leaks in the camera, light leaks in the developing tank, old film...) I decided to greatly scale down my project from a holistic 15-20 image collage ranging from Harkness desolate in the wee hours of the morning to the hustle and bustle of our weekly 'Pizza Night.'

After a few hours of deliberation with the 180-200 negatives I shot (only about two thirds of which were fully viable options) I finally decided on a new concept: THE HARKNESS KITCHEN: an atmosphere unique.

In this, instead of a large scale project with many images, I really spent a lot of time choosing specific images I felt were really representative of the cooks, the atmosphere of cooking, and the camaraderie and passion of all the people involved with the cooking in Harkness. Each image was placed with intent and chosen to illustrate a specific aspect of the kitchen that I feel is important. Harkness is busy, complicated, but above all a real community of people who care about each other and I really tried to bring this out in my prints.

Enjoy.

B/W Photography Project 3: Emmulation Project

Some of the best pieces that have been made were based partially or wholly on preexisting pieces. It is also said that imitation is the purest form of flattery. Irregardless of whether or not these are true, for this project we were tasked to choice an artist or group of artists or style of art and then attempt to emulate it in our own work.

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In Modern Society, the human body has become an intrinsically sexual, fetishised ideal. Modern culture seems to seems to obsess over the perfect shape and its gendered appeal.

In the 1970s Allen Teger did a photographic project entitled Bodyscapes, in which he decided to refashion the sensual object that is the human body into a seductive landscape. The curves of a woman's breasts become rolling hills; the masculine flatness of a man's back becomes a the setting for a motorcycle race.

In my emulation of the self-same work, I decided to keep with the concept of 'the body as landscape' but to take the project's impetus in a different direction. Instead of embellishing the sensual nature of the body, with my models I tried to remove their inherent sexiness/sexualized gender; effectively trying to dehumanize them. I also choose to replace Teger's vintage plastic toys with stuffed animal pandas — the reasoning behind which is that the panda is often caricatured by the uninformed public as a docile and innocent. The inclusion of the cuddly panda then changes the nude from an abstract human form to a surreal landscape.

In this project the supremely innocent figure is presented on the naked body to explore preconceptions and perceptions; it is impossible to view and image and not make judgments and conclusions about it, but why?

B/W Photography Project 4: Persona Project

The concept of identity and what composes a person is a topic often fraught with with discussion and disagreement. In order to generate ideas, we reviewed a large variety of different photographs that were related to the concept of the persona. Some were of self portraits, some were of trains, but all had and underlying sense of exploration and definition. For this project, we were tasked to define persona in our own way

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"Indexing is the act of demarcating an object at a specific time, to represent how it behaved/existed in that time frame alone as to avoid possible confusion. For example Daniel: Age 3 behaves very differently than Daniel: Age 15."

- General Semantics Theory

There is no such thing as two completely identical objects. When you look snowflakes under a microscope, obviously they are not the same. However, if you measure an orange one day and then again weeks later, the same orange will give you a different reading. To measure this temporal change, we use indexing.

Throughout my life I have always found myself flitting from one group of people to the next, making friends easily, but making attachments only with great difficulty. In addition, as a third culture child, my sense of otherness has been magnifies as after returning of my place of birth I find I am more of an alien than in the foreign lands I just departed.

This project attempts to index the different facets of my life and subcultures that I did/still belong to. Some of the representations are literal and some are metaphorical but all are true and are me. The images are presented fading into the black background to represent the tentative and intangible hold that each had on my life, never quite becoming fully realised, but instead fluctuating in and out of my life, just like the many locales I have tried to call home.

To be added

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Project Slideshow:

B/W Photography Project 1: Experimenting Projects

In the beginning of my photo class we did two short projects where we were basically supposed to just mess around with and get a feel for the camera - what were its strengths and what were its weaknesses. These projects were really just about exploration and nothing else.
The negatives for both projects can be found at the end of the post.

Print a Photo project -
For this project we were supposed to print one of the photos that we shoot on the two rolls of film that the professor supplied us. Mine was of the dining area in the co-operative that I eat in.


Black and White project -
For this project we were supposed to take pictures of and print 3 images. One that was black on black, one that was white on white, and one that was black on white. This was to get us used to printing with the full spectrum of black to white. It also was to show us that even though something was white when you shot it — that does not mean it has to or will print white.

B/W Photography Project 5: Utopia Project

For the final project in my photography class we were invited to explore the concept of Utopia. Disregarding B/W film for this project, I choose to shoot this project in medium format colour film. Unfortunately, my camera stopped working and so I re-shot the project digitally (hence their are no negatives for the final prints)

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Throughout my life, I have been searching for meaning. Cynical, dark, agitated, and pessimistic in humour, I often view my surroundings through a prematurely jaded lens. With this nihilist approach in mind, I am more apt to scorn utopian thought and concepts than embrace them.

However, in the past few years, I have been trying to dig myself out of this self imposed hole and ground myself with a more appreciative view of the world. In this journey, I have latched on to various loadstones to anchor myself in reality. Moments, images, events, little glimpses or extended parts of my life; these have really taken hold of me in a strong way.

It is in these objects, fragments from a tumultuous life, that I have found my utopia. Each one brings another side of me: personal, emotional, and powerful. In them, I find my peace.

"Utopia is not perfection in entirety, but an interwoven mass of imperfections culminated into one individual's perfect moment"