Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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More Prints

478 words on

I spent the afternoon in a photo lab once more, making more prints of my photos. This time I used the lab in the student residence I used to live in. In fact they sort-of still ‘owed’ me this photo lab usage as I tried to get some instructions on how to work in the lab and use it back when I lived there. But back then the ‘tutor’ in charge of it (who apparently didn’t know anything about the photo stuff) managed to drag my requests out by not answering e-mails and so on that I moved out before managing to get into the lab.

But now I was. And it’s quite a nice lab. Much larger than the one we’ve been to the previous time, with a more fancy projector for making the prints (which I failed to understand in full) and a much more convenient, easy to use and fool/spillage-proof bit for all the liquids. On the other hand, the equipment was less complete – with some handy things like the paper cutter just missing.

But I won’t complain as I managed to make quite a few nice prints there on the giant 30cm×40cm photo paper I bought. My preliminary conclusion is that size does matter. Whatever you do just looks so much cooler in a huge size. On the downside, I got the impression that even with ISO 400 films, the grain can be clearly visible on the prints.

I’ve indulged in my old digital analogy… simply taking digital photos of the handmade analogue prints. Absurd, but the only way to send them around while minimising the time consumption for the digital step and maximizing the opportunities for things to get out of focus or otherwise blurry…

Espresso machine

That was Jan-Philipp’s espresso machine after a small espresso testing / tasting bash we indulged in. The next one is rather cool and was taken in a lab in Ansgar’s department. They do laser experiments there and have a very powerful laser (several hundred Watts) there which points into the room I took the photo in (obviously not at that time). The bottom of the photo is a table thats just a massive chunk of stone coming from the ground. And in fact the ground inside that lab room is rested on a basement of its own to minimise vibrations. The room’s walls are all black to minimise reflections. Quite cool, I’d say, but they wouldn’t let me move in. In addition, the mirror you see is apparently an ultra-smooth one.

Dark lab with mirror

Finally, I also kept some of the little snippets of paper I used to check whether the exposure time, gradation and other settings were all right before exposing one of the large sheets. Those are little snippets from different photos. If you can tell me the location of more than one of them, I’ll be impressed.

Photo Snippets from exposure testing

December 18, 2005, 0:01

Tagged as bw.

Comments

Comment by ssp: User icon

Check out a scanned negative version of the mirror image above on flickr.

April 12, 2006, 12:20

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