Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Following up from yesterday’s photo lab report, here comes more stuff:

We also played around with some additional techniques this time. For example by drawing and printing stuff on transparencies and then putting those on the negatives or the photo paper to give additional white there. That’s quite cool. And even the problem I had with getting laser printers to print fully opaquely on the transparencies was kind of an advantage in this context as it made the printed areas not 100% white on the print but let some of the image shine through.

On the other hand, the attempt to use grey scales or gradients didn’t work too well because the printer’s raterising became quite apparent in the prints and made things look less than good (this one showing a mosaiced gradient):

print with a mosaic gradient on it and with printer raster visible on that

What did work rather well was to put my little Snowman on the prints (☃ in Hiragino). It’s slightly imperfect because I hand copied it from the original to get good opaqueness. I used it on different prints, giving a fully white snowman on some and just leaving it on there for half the exposure time on others to get a version blending it better with the rest of the photo:

Print with a Snowman added to the photo

And then there’s the barcode! Using my good old nutella barcode of course, I printed that at the size of a negative and put it right into the projector with the negative, giving a white barcode on my print (I should have inverted it I guess, so that there’s at least a chance of the thing scanning properly…):

Print with a barcode on a photo

Finally, someone else tried to do some solarisations which was quite cool (and I just love how all those terms in Photoshop menus start making sense once you know about the physical processes they correspond to) and we also used some sepia toner (looks disgusting, smells of rotten eggs…) to process some of our prints with. It gave a nice shade of brown to them as seen in the first two shots below (toned, untoned):

Three prints of the same photo with long exposure and toning at the top, long exposure in the middle and usual exposure at the bottom

That series of photos is quite interesting as well, btw. It may be an accidental solution to the problem that dark skinned people often look too dark and flat in prints: I took the photo with a flash from rather close by which gave me a photo that definitely was too light. But by over-exposing the print I could get the dark shades almost back to where they belong. Amazingly without losing too many shades in the dark areas and leaving me with an easily recongisable print that may just be a little too light.

January 14, 2007, 0:34

Tagged as bw.

Comments

Comment by Peter McMaster: User icon

Like your photos, though I must admit I came here because of the snowman! I use him as an icon too, though I’ve coloured in his hat red and added a tassel…

January 15, 2007, 22:28

Comment by ssp: User icon

Yeah, the snowman is great and the one from Hiragino almost begs for that oriental look with the tassel.

I was quite disappointed that snowmen from other typefaces often look more like children’s drawings and that non-Mac users may often get a not so nice result when seeing the Snowman on web sites as a consequence.

January 15, 2007, 23:22

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