Friday, October 24, 2008

I'm seeing blue


This semester I am taking Alternative Photo at SJSU. If working in the darkroom wasn't obscure enough these days, this class takes it a step further, by finding- you guessed it, alternative ways to print photos.

No need for any fiber based paper or lines of trays under the amber light (although may choose to create their negatives in the traditional darkroom, but is that so traditional?). Print on what you want: watercolor paper, wood, wool, cotton. Anything that'll let you really.

So for I first assignment, we did Cyanotypes. These print pretty well on watercolor paper, which is what I chose to use. One gal tried wood, but couldn't get it to work.

Since this is a sort of vintage process, I decided to go with some vintage cars as my subject. I had some pretty good shots from the Monterey Historics and wanted to pump those pics up a little more.

A quick rundown of the process is: you coat your paper (or whatever you want) with the solution that contains potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate. Then after it dries, you put an inverted transperancy on top and expouse in the sun for a few minutes. Next you rinse for about ten minutes, drop in a little hydrogen peroxide. All of a sudden you get this gorgeous blue print.

I made things hard on myself, trying to print large. I wanted 16x20s and the biggest I found to print transparencies was 8.5x11. So I put four of them together on one. I later found that I can buy rolls of Pictorico that are much larger (but also more expensive.)

The image on this post, doesn't do the process justice. But it gives you an idea.

Next is Van Dykes. Can someone say Cowboy Up?

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Alexandra


So I am working on an assignment for class, and had to coax my friend into posing for me. I had to donate my money to some deaf turtles who some cruel people painted.

Just kidding. The money went to children of the Painted Turtle Camp, that her Sorority was helping out with.

But anyways, she did an excellent job modeling for me, even though she said she wouldn't. I used two hot lights for these photos. One behind and one in front of her. I got the lighting I was going for in the photos and she did an excellent job standing there, I mean modeling. The good thing about hot lights is that you usually get what you see.

I have not dealt with these kind of lights much or even bigger strobes, except when i worked at a studio. They are easier to manage than small strobes, though not as portable. One of my favorite studio photographers, whose name escapes me at the moment and it is killing me, used hot lights all the time and created wonderful images.

But these lights live up to their names and get really hot.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Blessed

I can't describe the week I had as other than blessed. The main reason: I got to cover my favorite football team, the New England Patriots, as they practiced at SJSU while on the West Coast.

Needless to say, I was pretty stoked. Here are a couple of pics of Randy Moss, who was not very media friendly at all.

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Judo


So I had an assignment for the Spartan Daily, and was hoping for to come away with some better pics. Last week was one of those weeks where the obvious couldn't be more oblivious to me. So I look back now wondering why I didn't do this or that.

I went into this assignment with an idea in mind of catching San Jose State Judo athlete Jeff Fong throwing someone with some hard light coming from the front and back and hopefully blacking out most of the background. I only half accomplished that, as I failed to get the back all blacked out. But it is still an interesting photo.