Assignment 1c Response

Working with film for the first time was definitely a very interesting experience. It didn’t really seem like any of us knew what exactly we were doing, like we had an idea, but it was difficult at first. We spent a lot of time in the library trying to get one shot to come out perfect. We fumbled with the light meter a lot and weren’t really sure if we were using it right because we were getting weird readings. Looking back, it was obvious we just didn’t have enough light. That shot ended up not even making it onto the CD we got from the processing place, which was very frustrating. 

When it came to be my turn to take my shots, someone suggested the bicycle rack and I thought that was a great idea. I crouched down and got into position and tried to line up the composition to look as nice as I could. I waited for the distance to be measured and the light meter to be read before turning to the appropriate settings on the camera. I happened to get really lucky with how the first shot turned out; someone riding their bike just happened to poke into the frame at just the right time. I photoshopped that bike into the shot that was one stop up, because I liked the contrast more in that one. My second photo went about the same way and we had really gotten into the hang of things as a group at this point. I took an extreme close up of some leaves with raindrops on them that I thought would make for a great photograph. Jake’s blog post goes into great depth about the bracketed photos of the leaves and explains it better than I could: http://chamelinexperimental302.blogspot.com/2013/09/light-observations.html#comment-form

I liked the challenge that shooting on film brought compared to taking pictures digitally. It almost seems artificial and too easy to shoot digitally now, compared to the more organic way of taking pictures with a film camera. You actually have to pay huge attention to what you’re doing because if you mess up, you can’t just go back into the camera and delete it. You actually just wasted money if you messed up a shot on film. I guess wasted is the wrong word there… It’s more of a learning experience messing up with film. You probably won’t make that same mistake twice!