Street Level Photoworks B&W Weekend Course

It's taken me since early 2008 to get around to this.

At last, this past weekend, I've learned how to develop and print photos properly thanks to Street Level Photoworks & our tutor Alicia Bruce. On Saturday morning it was the basics of how an SLR works, (you can see my hands in the bottom right of the first photo, here, and my Nikon F in the second one); then we went out and took photos. In the afternoon we developed the negs. None of this was new to me, but it was still useful to go through it all again, professionally. I didn't let on, for example, that I've never used stop bath, I've always just got by with washing up liquid.

The negs dried over night, and on Sunday we went into the darkroom with the enlargers and this is all new to me now. It got really paradoxical: making a test strip, contact sheet, and then the actual print was all pretty straightforward, once you get the hang of obvious no-nos like leaving the photographic paper out of the box, and dipping the dev tongs into the stop... But getting it right was much more difficult. I mean, getting from clicking the shutter in Glasgow city centre, to a print that's good enough to go on the wall - that was not achieved by me, at any rate.

You can tweak with the enlarger, change the aperture and contrast. And there was a brief look at dodging and burning. But these things require much more skill in the analogue process than they do in the digital. Mostly, I realized that the negative must be good: unless you're very lucky, being snap-happy just won't cut it. I raced through 36 exposures in less than an hour. But to get exhibition-quality prints will take more thought in the planning and care in the execution, regarding subject matter, light, framing and composition.

So the next stage is to stick with 35mm B&W using only the Nikon F. It might take weeks or months to get to the standard I want. Thing is, I don't feel right going off into other projects, like developing decades old film found in second hand cameras, until I've got to grips with this. 


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